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Submission Statement

Michael Kofman has released a new episode of the Russian Contingency. Unfortunately, I have no way of sharing the episode, but I have summarized some of the key points he made below.

-Ukraine has made incremental gains along all three axes of the counteroffensive, most notably Bakhmut.

-Bakhmut is difficult to defend, but has lots of political significance--good target for a fixing action.

-Offensive is well underway--no longer a probing attack. Not going as well as Ukraine had hoped. Pivoting to an attritional approach.

-Forces that have been committed are a mix of forces--Western-trained, regular units, even TDF.

-Train-and-equip approach, trying to pivot Ukrainian units to combined arms, has struggled. Ukrainians cannot mass without support equipment to get through defenses. Ukrainians continue to sequence operations as opposed to combined arms tactics

-DPICMs are a big deal--more important than ATACMS or F-16s. Artillery munitions supply is the sand in the hourglass, so DPICMS takes time pressure off of Ukrainian forces. Quantity is more important than quality here.

-Territory taken is a lagging indicator--the real determinant is attrition, the levels of which are unclear.

-Kofman is skeptical that Russians plan to damage ZNPP, believes it is a product of Ukrainian anxiety after the Khakova dam breach.

-The recent flurry of nuclear signaling by Russia is puzzling in terms of timing, motive, and relevance. Russia is not losing ground or in a situation where it might actually try to use nukes. The people doing this are not the most relevant to decision-making in the Kremlin. Russian nuclear force posture has not changed in conjunction with messaging.

-Nuclear weapons are significant even in conflict like this--they force the other parties involved to be careful about escalation. Allowed Russia to keep the war localized(horizontal escalation) and contained(vertical escalation).

-However, Russia is finding that nuclear weapons are not useful for compellence, and the later in the war it gets the less Russia can squeeze out of its nuclear signaling. Same lesson the Soviets learned.

-Prigozin's attack ended up as a "mutiny-plus". Still questions about the levels of passive support within Russian military. Wagner was pulled back from the front, so short-term impacts are low. Still questions over who will take over operations in Africa and elsewhere.

-Putin's regime is not Stalin's. Don't expect purges. But Putin is dealing from a position of weakness right now, and that won't last forever. The current deal with Prigozhin is unlikely to be the end of the story.

Michael Kofman is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and a Principal Research Scientist at CNA, focused on Russian military & defense analysis.

Submission Statement

Recent attempts by private US citizens to negotiate directly with the Russian government have brought renewed attention to the topic of conflict termination. This article by Oriana Skylar Mastro and David A Siegel discusses the forces and conditions which drive countries to the negotiating table, as well as those which may incentivize leaders to refuse negotiations. The authors introduce the concept of "resiliency", the capacity for a state to resist further escalation. States are concerned that the act of opening up negotiations will be perceived as further weakness, giving their opponent an incentive to double down or increase the intensity of their attacks Conditions and actions which reduce the risk of escalation or increase resiliency should therefore increase the chance of states opening negotiations. One way this can occur is through signaling resiliency by the state currently refusing negotiations. The goal is to disincentivize escalation in response to a signal of weakness by showing that said state is capable of resisting further escalation, such as through a "costly signal". Another is the assessment by one party that the other finds further escalation to be too costly. An important note is that states see these costs as blows to their perception, independent of the actual state of the battlefield. As a result, the authors find that "face-saving measures", like unilaterally reducing the intensity of a conflict, are less effective than might be hoped because they fail to address the perception of vulnerability that states see as the true cost of negotiation. This dynamic holds while states have high resiliency, where they can be confident that further escalation by their opponent will not result in their outright defeat. When states have low resilience(in other words, when they are lo longer able to prevent or resist the opponent's escalation), they may open negotiations at the first opportunity, choosing to accept the costs of being perceived as weak in order to avoid the greater costs of an outright defeat.

The implications for the conflict in Ukraine are clear. First and foremost, this article is a strong rebuttal to the idea put forth by Haass and Kupchan that the West can compel Ukraine to the negotiating table while continuing to provide sufficient aid to repel further Russian attempts at conquest. As long as Ukraine remains a "high-resiliency" state, capable of credibly defeating Russian escalation, they will be loathe to give an impression of weakness that could incentivize Russia to double down. Similarly, given that Russia's entire thesis of victory rests on the idea of the West eventually exhausting its will for escalation and ceasing its aid to Ukraine, Haass and Kupchan's decision to open negotiations with Russia signals that the West is reaching that point of "low-resiliency", where it is looking to cuts its losses with early negotiation. This in turn would be an incentive for Russia to further escalate, on the presumption that the West will be unable to prevent or impose costs for doing so.

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank.

David A Siegel is in the Department of Political Science at Duke University

Getting belligerents to the negotiating table is complicated and fraught with difficulties, both in theory and practice. A willingness to talk is seen as the first concession, affecting an adversary’s beliefs about the balance of power and resolve long before offers are exchanged. Assuming, as is often done, that talks occur during fighting inhibits our understanding of the process of war. This article contributes to our understanding of conflict and its negotiated conclusion by proposing a novel mechanism to explain why rational states may refuse to talk during war and when they might change their positions. We find that states are willing to open negotiations under two conditions: when their opponents find escalation too costly, and when there is a signal of high resilience that only the highly resilient care to use.

Those findings have important policy implications. Political scientists have long recognized the dilemma of compellence—states may be reluctant to give in because of concerns that they are opening themselves up to even more coercion (Schelling, 1966). We show that states may be reluctant to show a willingness to talk for the same reason, and therefore, it can be counterproductive to attempt to coerce an enemy to the negotiating table. Todd Sechser (2010: 649) recommends that the stronger country issuing the compellent threat offer side payments or make lesser demands to assuage the reputational costs the target states may pay for acquiescing to deal with such challenges.

Our findings suggest a different explanation: states are concerned with the negative material consequences that their approach to diplomacy may convey to the enemy, and so face-saving measures emanating from the enemy do not allow a state to save face. After all, it would remain clear to the enemy that a decision to adopt an open stance signaled weakness, and that adverse inference would still yield the potential for escalation by the enemy. While the limitations of face-saving measures emanating from the adversary are discouraging, our findings suggest new opportunities for outside mediators, who can provide guarantees in ways that lessen the strategic costs of conversation.

An ever-increasing number of modern wars are limited conflicts that end in negotiated settlement (Pillar, 1983). Understanding how military outcomes translate into political outcomes—how combat outcomes and diplomatic behavior interact to affect the likelihood that all sides will come to the table—is of greater importance than ever before. This article sheds light on the factors that influence states’ decisions about talking to the enemy during wars and illustrates how future generations of policymakers can shape those factors for peace.

Submission Statement

Much like the air and land war, the naval theatre of the war in Ukraine has been characterized by the success of denial and deterrence technologies against traditional implements of concentrated force. While the Moskva is the flashy example of this, I'd argue that its sinking was a bit of a fluke, and even a distraction from the real impact of AShMs and sea mines--which is their strong deterrence effect on the fleet more broadly. Keeping the Russian fleet at bay from Ukraines shores has allowed the country to continue using its southern ports, which have proven to be a vital economic lifeline for both itself and the global South. By contrast, Ukraine's USV attacks, which appear aimed specifically at attriting Russian naval capability, have had only limited or symbolic impacts thus far. This article provides an overview of the current state of the naval war, and how Ukrainian tactics and Russian counters to them are developing.

If you'd prefer mostly the same info in a video/podcast format, Perun's video on the sinking of the Moskva is an excellent primer to many of the same issues discussed here.

This article is the sixth in a series by the Economist focused on lessons learned from the Ukraine war. The articles are written for a layman audience, but even dedicated watchers can derive value from the interviews and novel information sprinkled throughout. I plan on posting them in sequence here, and the full set of 7 articles can be found here.

Shashank Joshi is The Economist‘s defence editor. Prior to joining The Economist in 2018, he served as Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and Research Associate at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Programme.

The inflection point came on April 14th 2022, when Ukraine sank the Moskva, a Russian cruiser, the largest loss of a warship since the Falklands war in 1982. The Black Sea Fleet promptly moved back and is still 100-150 nautical miles off the Ukrainian coast, says Admiral Neizhpapa. That has lifted the threat of an amphibious assault on Odessa: anti-tank obstacles that once guarded roads have been pushed aside and soldiers sent to other parts of the front. And it paved the way for a deal in July whereby Russia agreed to let Ukraine keep exporting grain. This helps not only Ukraine, 70% of whose pre-war trade went through the Black Sea, but also grain-importing countries of the global south.

There was nothing revolutionary about the Moskva operation. “To me, it shows the importance of proper land-based anti-ship missiles, sea mines and good intelligence,” says Niklas Granholm of FOI, Sweden’s defence research agency, “all put together in a coherent operational concept.” Luck played a role: atmospheric conditions might have let Ukraine’s radars see unusually far. So did Russia’s ineptitude. Just as its massive tank losses were down to poor tactics, not technological change making armour obsolete, so the Moskva is a cautionary tale of getting the basics right.

Being hit is one thing; failing to control the subsequent fire is another. “Damage control remains a key metric against which professional naval standards should be assessed,” concludes Alessio Patalano of King’s College London. “On the day of the sinking I was confronted by army colleagues: this must surely be the end of the idea of building big warships?” recalls Rune Andersen, chief of the Norwegian navy. “I said no: it’s the end of having a 40-year-old warship which hasn’t been updated and without trained crews.” A newer warship with better air defences and a sharper crew might have parried the Ukrainian missiles.

The maritime contest is in stalemate. Ukraine has achieved “sea denial” near its coast, stopping Russian ships coming close. But Russian warplanes roam freely, preventing Ukrainian naval vessels from coming out. The result is a “grey area” of 25,000 square kilometres in the north-west Black Sea in which neither side can “move freely”, says Admiral Neizhpapa. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet squats in relative safety, imposing a distant blockade and frequently lobbing Kalibr cruise missiles at Ukraine. Ukraine has good intelligence on the fleet’s movements thanks to America and Britain, which are fusing data from satellites and surveillance aircraft. But it lacks missiles with sufficient range to hit what it sees. That has forced it to turn to other means.

“Drones are very important elements of our warfare right now,” says Admiral Neizhpapa. “The warfare of the future is a warfare of drones.” He adds that Ukraine is learning by doing. “No other country has as much experience using naval drones.” Whether that will be enough to break Russia’s blockade is another question. A raid on Sevastopol in March seems to have been repelled, with one USV blocked by a boom and two others destroyed by machineguns. Not every USV will get through. But the technology is proving itself on another, murkier front of the naval war.

Submission Statement

War is a continuous process of adaptation, and the Russians are no exception to this. Over the last year and a half, the Russian army has altered its tactics, updated its doctrine, and even introduced new weapons to match or neutralize Ukrainian advantages. This article summarizes a few of those adaptations to Ukrainian efforts. However, it is far from a complete survey, and I would recommend reading through RUSI's article on the subject, which is much more complete.

This article is the fifth in a series by the Economist focused on lessons learned from the Ukraine war. The articles are written for a layman audience, but even dedicated watchers can derive value from the interviews and novel information sprinkled throughout. I plan on posting them in sequence here, and the full set of 7 articles can be found here.

Shashank Joshi is The Economist‘s defence editor. Prior to joining The Economist in 2018, he served as Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and Research Associate at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Programme.

Russia now sends small packets of “disposable” infantry, a handful of men at a time, often under the influence of amphetamines, to “skirmish…until killed”, exposing Ukrainian positions. Larger groups of better-trained assault infantry then move in, backed by armour, mortars and artillery. If a position is taken, it is fortified within 12 hours. “The…speed with which Russian infantry dig, and the scale at which they improve their fighting positions, is noteworthy,” say Mr. Watling and Mr. Reynolds. Russian engineers have built fortifications and bridges and laid minefields.

Russian gunnery is improving. Drones can be connected to artillery batteries via the Strelets computer system, letting Ukrainian targets be struck within minutes of detection. One tactic, say the authors, “is for the Russians to withdraw from a position that is being assaulted and then saturate it with fire once Ukrainian troops attempt to occupy it.” Such “fire pockets” are one of the biggest risks to Ukraine’s counter-offensive. Russian tanks also make better use of camouflage. They fight at dusk and dawn when their temperature signature is less obvious. Russia’s reactive armour, which explodes outward, has “proven highly effective”, with some tanks surviving multiple hits.

Russian air defences, much derided on social media, are increasingly connected, allowing them to share data on incoming threats. They are shooting down a significant proportion of strikes by GMLRS—the GPS-guided rockets, fired from American HIMARS launchers—that played havoc with Russian headquarters last year. Russia has been pulling command-and-control centres farther back, dispersing and hardening them and wiring physical cables to brigades closer to the front. Meanwhile Russia’s air force, an irrelevance for much of the war, is making more use of glide bombs, in which a guidance kit is fitted to older “dumb” munitions. That poses a growing threat to Ukrainian troops moving south.

Submission Statement

The line between civilian and combatant is becoming increasingly blurred. Decentralized networks and distributed sensors mean that any individual civilian could be a lethal threat to the soldiers in their proximity. In turn, the paranoia this engenders drives soldiers to treat even ordinary civilians with suspicion and hostility, sometimes with grievous consequences. This dynamic poses a challenge for all future occupying powers, especially those without Russia's propensity for brutality against the innocent. This article focuses on the problems Ukrainian civilian resistance has posed to Russia, but disambiguating when a collaborator becomes a valid military target remains a thorny issue that Ukraine will have to deal with as they plan on pushing into areas that Russia has occupied for close to a decade now.

This article is the fourth in a series by the Economist focused on lessons learned from the Ukraine war. The articles are written for a layman audience, but even dedicated watchers can derive value from the interviews and novel information sprinkled throughout. I plan on posting them in sequence here, and the full set of 7 articles can be found here.

Shashank Joshi is The Economist‘s defence editor. Prior to joining The Economist in 2018, he served as Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and Research Associate at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Programme.

Early in the war 20 Russian fuel tankers rolled into Sedniv, a small town in Chernihiv province, north of Kyiv. “The locals called us,” says Major-General Viktor Nikolyuk, commander of Ukrainian forces in the north, “and said: what should we do?” His answer was simple: “Drain them.” Locals on horses and tractors, carrying bottles, barrels and teapots, siphoned off fuel with the cry of Slava Ukraini—glory to Ukraine. The general could hardly believe it when another round of tankers appeared shortly afterwards. Those, too, were relieved of their cargo.

Small wars are fought by a country’s armed forces. Total wars are waged by entire nations. Civilians have played a huge role in the defence of Ukraine. When Ukrposhta, Ukraine’s national postal agency, held a competition to design a stamp, the winning entry depicted a tractor towing away a captured Russian tank—one of the war’s most iconic images. When Kyiv was under threat, civilians mixed Molotov cocktails to hurl at invading armoured vehicles. Volunteers have raised money for vehicles and drones. The Serhiy Prytula Foundation, a civilian charity, even bought a satellite for the army. “Kyiv has placed cross-society resistance at the heart of its national defence,” writes Hanna Shelest of Ukrainian Prism, a think-tank.

Digitally enabled popular resistance on this scale would have been largely impossible 15 years ago. Jack McDonald of King’s College London points out that, when America invaded Afghanistan in 2001, less than 1% of the local population had access to the internet. In Syria in 2011, when a civil war was already under way and mobile-phone footage of combat became widespread, the rate was still only 22%. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 it had reached 46%. When it did it again last year the figure had shot up to almost 80%. “What you’re seeing in Ukraine,” he says, “is what’s going to be standard.”

A core principle of international humanitarian law is that armed forces must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. But if civilians are building drones, hauling military gear over the border from Poland, reporting on troop movements through apps and correcting artillery fire over video chat, do they become legitimate military targets? The Geneva Conventions lay down that civilians lose protection “for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities”. But what this means is hotly disputed.

All this presupposes that armies are making good-faith efforts to discriminate between civilians and soldiers—that they care about the laws of war. If Ukrainian civilians have so often been willing to jeopardise their status as non-combatants, it may be because Russia’s army has shown scant regard for such niceties. General Nikolyuk recalls Russian troops establishing a headquarters in a school in Yahidne, a village south of Chernihiv. Hundreds of locals were imprisoned in the basement. On another occasion in nearby Lukashivka, he says Russian soldiers, spotting a Ukrainian drone, forced women and children to walk down the street as human shields. “What do you do in such cases? You bite your fists with impotence and that’s it.”

Submission Statement

This article is the third in a series by the Economist focused on lessons learned from the Ukraine war. The articles are written for a layman audience, but even dedicated watchers can derive value from the interviews and novel information sprinkled throughout. I plan on posting them in sequence here, and the full set of 7 articles can be found here.

"Logisticians are a sad and embittered race of men who are very much in demand in war, and who sink resentfully into obscurity in peace. They deal only in facts, but must work for men who merchant in theories. They emerge during war because war is very much a fact. They disappear in peace because peace is mostly theory."

Whatever theories the Russian army was operating under when they rolled into Ukraine on February 24th were quickly dispelled by the cold hard facts of logistical insufficiency. The feasibility, or lack thereof, of supplying forward positions has underpinned some of Russia's most stunning retreats throughout the war. This article explains the aspects of Russian doctrine that led to their logistical difficulties, as well as Ukraine's efforts to avoid the same while juggling the most diverse arsenal of weapons anywhere in the world.

Shashank Joshi is The Economist‘s defence editor. Prior to joining The Economist in 2018, he served as Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and Research Associate at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Programme.

Western armies tend to have high “tooth-to-tail” ratios, with as many as ten support personnel for every combat soldier. Russia has fewer. Like the Soviet Union, it relies on moving fuel by pipeline and other material by rail. That can be highly efficient: Russia’s army managed to shift and fire a cumulative total of 700,000 tonnes of shells and rockets in the first five months of the war. But it ties the army to railheads and large depots nearby. That has turned out to be a problem. In the spring of 2022 Russian shellfire was grinding down Ukraine’s army in the eastern Donbas. Russian guns out-pounded Ukrainian batteries by three to one. That changed when Ukraine acquired American himars launchers and European systems capable of firing rockets precisely over 70km. Suddenly it could hit Russian fuel depots and ammo dumps well behind the front lines. Many had not budged since 2014.

The ensuing bonfire of supplies starved Russian guns of ammo. It forced Russia to switch from big, centralised depots to smaller, dispersed ones farther from the front. The longer distances to haul heavy shells, plus a paucity of trucks, pallets and logisticians, threw grit into the wheels of Russia’s military machine. Ukrainian officials say this paved the way for successful offensives in Kherson and Kharkiv. Nico Lange, a former German defence official, says that a Ukrainian soldier chalked up this success to understanding Russia’s logistical weaknesses: “It’s basically like fighting ourselves from ten to 15 years ago.”

The problem is keeping the weapons going once they arrive. Steven Anderson, a retired American general who oversaw logistics in Iraq, says that the “operational readiness rate” for equipment there was 95%. Anything below 90% would get a commander pulled up in front of bosses. In Ukraine anecdotal data suggests it is only around 50%, he says. “Half of what we give them is broken at any given time and they’re struggling mightily.” For much of the war, Ukraine’s exhausted artillery pieces have been sent to eastern Europe to fix. Since the autumn, more can be repaired in Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city near the southern front. But its capacity is limited. Mr Anderson complains that less than 4% of American aid has been allocated to support and maintenance.

That is forcing Ukraine to pioneer new forms of wartime sustainment. Ukrainian volunteers are 3d-printing spare parts in buildings a few hours’ drive from the front. Key to this is decentralisation. Individual brigades often find their own parts rather than asking the general staff’s logistics command. “They just go to the garage,” says one source familiar with the underground supply chain, “and say: I need this piece. Can you do it?” Separately, America’s Airborne XVIII Corps is using algorithms to estimate the barrel life of Ukrainian howitzers, when they need spare parts and when fresh munitions must be pushed to the front.

America has grown used to sustaining wars thousands of miles away with scant threats to ships, planes and trucks carrying supplies to ports, airfields and depots. Those days are over. “Decades of wargaming, analysis, and empirical evidence suggest that attacking [American] logistical dependencies…is the most effective way of fighting the United States,” concludes Chris Dougherty, a former Pentagon planner, in a paper. Chinese attacks on logistics have “paralysed” American forces in war games, he says. He urges the Pentagon to shift money from combat forces to logistics. Armies need to position more stocks forward and “live off the land” to acquire fuel, lubricants, food and spare parts locally. Troops must fight on their own for weeks with minimal support, he adds. Logistics have long had “second-class status”, he says, despite a “starring role” in military history. Ukraine shows that anew

Submission Statement

This article is the second in a series by the Economist focused on lessons learned from the Ukraine war. The articles are written for a layman audience, but even dedicated watchers can derive value from the interviews and novel information sprinkled throughout. I plan on posting them in sequence here, and the full set of 7 articles can be found here.

The war in Ukraine has put electronic warfare in the spotlight, not least because many of the measures and countermeasures being deployed are some of Russia's most effective against NATO weaponry. This article provides an overview of those efforts, as well as NATO's own work to defeat them. Most notable among those are the EW maps that NATO is apparently providing Ukraine 32 times a day--a form of aid I had not heard mention of before.

Shashank Joshi is The Economist‘s defence editor. Prior to joining The Economist in 2018, he served as Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and Research Associate at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Programme.

Russian EW was “highly effective” in some areas, concludes the RUSI think-tank. Ukrainian jets initially found that their communications, navigation and radar were all disrupted and in some cases knocked out. The disruption to Excalibur has disturbed some Western officials. But Russia’s land and maritime capabilities have been “lacklustre”, argues Thomas Withingon, an expert analyst of EW. “Our [pre-war] assessment of Russian EW capability was at the pessimistic end of the range,” agrees Edward Stringer, a retired air marshal in Britain’s Royal Air Force. “Russian EW is eminently beatable.”

In truth, jamming is imperfect and intermittent. One reason is that EW systems are scarce. Russia has been forced to keep some at home to protect cities and bases. Another is that using them comes at a price. Big jammers emit a powerful signal, making them conspicuous targets. Russia has had to pull many of its best ones farther to the rear, says one official. This leaves gaps to exploit. America is providing Ukraine with cuts, or maps, of electromagnetic activity—essentially, the location of jamming and the frequencies used—32 times a day, says T.J. Holland of America’s XVIII Corps. That is a boon to Ukrainian drone operators.

GPS can also be supplemented with signals from communications satellites in low orbit (like Starlink), ground-based transmission sites (like Russia’s Loran system) and even magnetic-field navigation, suggests Mr. Goward. And as weapons increasingly morph into explosive computers, the line between EW and cyber-attacks is blurring. Andriy, the Ukrainian officer, says Ukraine often inserts malicious code into Russian drones mid-flight.

EW is ultimately a game of cat and mouse. Russia and Ukraine both seek “electromagnetic supremacy”, says Mr. Withington, but neither can achieve it for good. “Control will ebb and flow throughout the battle.” Jammers will find a way through; defenders will eventually plug the gap. America helped fix the problems with JDAM-ER by ensuring that the bombs acquired a good GPS signal before leaving the plane, according to leaked documents. Excalibur is now hitting its targets again, says a Western official. “In EW, things change very fast,” says Andriy. But the battle must be waged. “In this war, we see that if you do not dominate this domain, you will not be effective in other domains.”

Submission Statement

This article is the first in a series by the Economist focused on lessons learned from the Ukraine war. The articles are written for a layman audience, but even dedicated watchers can derive value from the interviews and novel information sprinkled throughout. I plan on posting them in sequence here, and the full set of 7 articles can be found here.

The first article takes a look at the impacts that new technologies have had on the current state of warfare. Ukraine has taken the reconnaissance-strike complex--sensors, shooters, and the networks that connect them--and elevated it to the level of doctrine. The article itself mentions several times their integration of drones and networking exceeds that of even NATO armies. Thus far, however, the massive leaps in technology and integration have failed to deliver on the lightning-fast, maneuver-dominated warfare promised by the likes of Desert Storm. This has resulted in a debate over the true impacts of wartime technology. I've seen this balance oversimplified in both directions. Users are equally prone to either declaring networked drones the end-all, be-all of weapons technology or concluding they are window dressing on the inevitability of attritional warfare. The author strikes a more nuanced position, noting that precision and the transparent battlefield alternately counter and magnify the effects of mass. Drones, like artillery, are valuable tools in a broader toolkit. Their success or failure on the battlefield ultimately comes down to the ingenuity and willpower of the humans making and wielding them.

Shashank Joshi is The Economist‘s defence editor. Prior to joining The Economist in 2018, he served as Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and Research Associate at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Programme.

Ukraine serves as a rejoinder to the idea that technology always trumps mass: that quality can replace quantity. General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British army, put it acerbically last year: “You can’t cyber your way across a river.”

But the paradox of the war is that mass and technology are intimately bound together. Even the artillery war shows this. Weeks before the invasion, America sent Ukraine Excalibur shells. Inside each was a small, rugged chip that could receive gps signals from America’s constellation of navigation satellites. Whereas Russia often relied on barrages over a wide area, Ukrainian gunners could be more precise. Such rounds were “disproportionately effective”, noted a study published by Mr Watling and his colleagues at rusi, drawing on data from Ukraine’s general staff. Not only did they take out targets more reliably; they reduced the number of shells needed, lowering the logistical burden (shells are heavy).

This digitisation of hardware reflects a collision of old and new ways of war. Much kit Ukraine has received is vintage, such as American howitzers or Soviet missile launchers designed before the Cuban missile crisis, or is stripped of sensitive components. Ukraine is pioneering “the ability to turn it from a dumb piece of cold-war metal into something that’s genuinely networked and part of this algorithmic warfare,” says a foreign adviser in Kyiv. “It is maddening,” noted James Heappey, a junior British defence minister, that “I am providing to the Ukrainians…capability that we’re still years away from getting in the British armed forces.”

Ukrainian planners, in contrast, waged “data-driven combat” at a level of “speed and precision that nato has not yet achieved”, concludes a report by Nico Lange, a former chief of staff at Germany’s defence ministry. Sometimes that has been down to tools like Kropyva and Delta. Firms such as Palantir, an American tech company, have used cutting-edge ai to help Ukraine find high-value targets. But data-driven warfare can be quietly prosaic, too. A Ukrainian police officer explains that last year his units were locating Russian troops simply by intercepting 1,000 conversations a day (the figure is now higher). If they found a general, the details were shared in an ad hoc WhatsApp group. “We were connected to the people who were literally bombing.”

Precision warfare can counter some advantages of mass: Ukraine was outnumbered 12 to one north of Kyiv. It can also complement mass. Software-based targeting saves around 15-30% in shells, according to sources familiar with the data. But what precision cannot do, says Michael Kofman of the Centre for Naval Analyses (cna), a think-tank, is substitute for mass. The idea behind the Soviet reconnaissance-strike complex or America’s rma was to win by paralysing the enemy, not wearing him down. But there seems to be no escape from attrition. War on the cheap is an illusion. Many people expected Russia’s invasion to be “a second Desert Storm”, says Andrew Krepinevich, an American defence official who pioneered the idea of the rma in the 1990s. “What we got was a second Iran-Iraq war.”

Submission Statement

The United States has embarked upon a wide-ranging campaign to refresh and deepen alliances all across the Indo-Pacific. AUKUS is perhaps the most concrete of those thus far. While its signature accomplishment is the procurement of nuclear submarines for Australia(Pillar 1), the initiative also involves knowledge and technology sharing across a wide spectrum of fields, including quantum and AI(Pillar 2). This interview serves to lay down some of the goals for the AUKUS partnership and the future progress needed to realize those goals.

This seems to be a transcript of an actual interview that happened live and was presumably recorded. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a video of the interview. If someone can find it I would be grateful!

Key Takeaways:

-Interoperability and interchangeability are watchwords for AUKUS programs. The AUKUS submarines will be shared between two nations and will have many components common to US submarines as well.

-The Admiral is still vague on where Virginia class subs that will be sold to Australia will come from. Maybe stockpiles, maybe new production. It sounds very contingent on whether the US shipyards currently building Virginias can hit their targets soon.

-AUKUS Pillar 2(tech sharing) has received interest from a range of nations, and both individuals were open to incorporating other nations based on their ability to contribute to the various fields encompassed.

-The first group of Australian submariners will graduate from the Nuclear Power School this week.

-The spy balloon incident highlighted the lack of military-military channels between the US and China.

-Pillar 2 has already had concrete achievements in AI and UAV technology but is still in a very preliminary stage.

Admiral Gilday is the son of a navy sailor and the 32nd Chief of Naval Operations. A surface warfare officer, he is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and holds master’s degrees from Harvard Kennedy School and the National War College.

Dr. Kurt Campbell serves as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs on the National Security Council. He was previously chairman and chief executive officer of The Asia Group.

AUKUS, as you can tell, is an extraordinarily ambitious program, and we're just beginning to understand the scale of those ambitions. This means investments into our own and our allies' systems, a real linking of Asian and European allies, an integration—to a larger degree—of our industrial capabilities. The ambition of this undertaking has grown commensurately with the scale of the challenge that we are all presented with. AUKUS was undertaken against the backdrop of a deteriorating security environment in the Indo-Pacific region, specifically, centering around the explosive growth of China's military capabilities and the increasingly aggressive use to which those military capabilities are put. Those two trends have heightened security concerns in the region and motivated AUKUS members to begin aligning their strategies and respond to the challenges posed by Beijing.

We're going to talk today largely about AUKUS. But there's the Quad. There are trilateral engagements that we've undertaken in Northeast Asia. We've sought to build on closer ties with Japan, with South Korea, with the Philippines. You will have seen last week, I think, a pretty substantial diplomatic initiative to open a much closer period of strategic orientation and partnership between the United States and India.

CNAS takes a critical look at the current state of the US munitions stockpile and finds a number of improvements that could improve the volume and stability of the munitions supply chain. While the article itself is a good summary of the findings, the report it is based on is attached at the bottom of the article and is worth looking into as well. It goes into quite a bit more detail, breaking out the status of stockpiles and supply chains for various munitions, as well as comparing the status of those supplies to the goals laid out in NDS 2022.

Stacie Pettyjohn is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Defense Program at CNAS. Her areas of expertise include defense strategy, posture, force planning, the defense budget, and wargaming.

Ultimately, the state of the industrial base will make or break whether the United States can produce enough weapons to realize the NDS. The war in Ukraine has shed light on serious deficiencies in the United States’ ability to quickly surge production of key weapons. To bolster industry, the DoD is pursuing the multiyear procurement (MYP) and large lot procurement (LLP) programs for several key PGMs. These programs will yield cost savings, but their primary benefit is strategic. MYP and LLP will strengthen the industrial base, providing industry with the stability it needs to expand production capacity. A healthy missiles-and-munitions industrial base enables the United States to counter Russia and will be a powerful deterrent to China.

Despite the progress that the FY24 budget makes in realizing the NDS by filling in critical gaps in the PGM portfolio, there remain significant shortfalls in stockpile depth and in industrial capacity. The DoD’s inventory of key PGMs, especially standoff weapons, maritime strike PGMs, and air defense interceptors remains too small to blunt an initial invasion, let alone prevail in a protracted conflict against China. It will take years to rebuild American stocks to pre-2022 levels for some of the PGMs given to Ukraine. Moreover, there is a risk that these plans do not come to fruition because of service or congressional pushback against the MYP and LLP programs. More can and should be done to address these deficiencies.

For the DoD, the authors make the following recommendations:

Make key conventional PGMs a separate reporting category and create a process that ensures a joint perspective is taken on key PGMs in each budget cycle.

Continue to buy long-range weapons, but also develop more medium-range weapons for the pacing threat. The DoD must seek an affordable mix appropriate for different U.S. delivery platforms.

Continue to invest in maritime strike from all domains. The Air Force should follow through on projected buys of the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) and Joint Strike Missile (JSM). The Army and Marine Corps should accelerate development and procurement of weapons such as the Maritime Strike Tomahawk (MST), the SM-6, and the long-range Land-Based Anti-Ship Missile (LBASM) that increase their ability to project power in the Pacific. Likewise, the Navy should continue to buy the Mk-48 heavyweight torpedo as well as SM-6 multirole missiles.

Continue to invest in an integrated and layered system of air defenses that includes a high-low mix that can be purchased in quantities sufficient to counter the Chinese threat. Specifically, the Army needs more of the affordable interceptors intended for air and cruise missile defense.

Embrace MYP for key conventional PGMs to provide a consistent demand signal to industry.

For Congress, the authors make the following recommendations:

Mandate that the DoD provides a report on key conventional PGM procurement annually and an assessment of its progress toward its stockpile requirements.

Continue to provide supplemental appropriations to support key weapons that will be needed for Ukraine and other allies and partners, which the NDS says are a center of gravity. Appropriate funds for the proposed MYP and LLP programs.

Consider making MYP for munitions a normal authority, expanding its use, and appropriating funds for these efforts.

Submission Statement

In addition to being just a genuinely excellent work of journalism, this article possesses both tactical and strategic insights into the war in Ukraine. Tactically speaking, this article is a soft acknowledgment that, despite armored vehicle aid being provided by the West, Ukraine continues to make heavy use of dismounted infantry and small-unit tactics. I'm skeptical of the article's claim that this was intended to keep the movement low profile--judging by the description of the defenses, even a small amount of armor would have been massively helpful in clearing the village quickly. Rather, this is likely a function of limited stockpiles of such vehicles and emphasizes the need for greater mobility aid to be donated by Western partners. Another point of interest is the coordination of soldiers and artillery by drone operators. The operators were the link between soldiers on the ground and their artillery support. Drones and drone operations as the nerve center of the Ukrainian offensive have been mentioned before but I found it interesting that the description given here implies that drones are the key to Ukraine's flexible and responsive reconnaissance/fires complex.

Another tactic mentioned here is artillery-based demining operations. Specifically, the article describes the (probably unguided) artillery barrage as being intended to destroy mines scattered around the outside of the village. While this makes intuitive sense(the pressure from the blast should detonate mines within a certain radius of the shell's impact) I had not heard of this tactic before. On the subreddit, there was a recent question about the feasibility of artillery-based demining and users seemed skeptical of its efficacy. From the way the article describes it, the tactic is at least plausible enough that the Ukrainians attempted it here.

Strategically speaking, the forces described here are interesting. 70 Ukrainian TDF soldiers(plus 20 or so reinforcements) vs. 150 Russians and an unknown number of Storm Z. First off, this is further confirmation that TDF has been mostly subsumed into the broader military structure as opposed to being linked to their home territories. Secondly, the Ukrainians were apparently told to expect 20 or so enemies. It's a major ISR failure that troops walked into a force concentration 10 times that. By all rights, this battle should have been a bloody failure, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are other villages where that was the case. As it was, the attack was stopped in its tracks until developments on the front nearby forced the Russians to leave their position. Tactical intelligence sharing would be massively helpful in these cases. I have no doubt that US ELINT and SATINT would have been more than capable of accurately assessing the force concentrations in the area. It's a low-cost, low-profile intervention that would save Ukrainian lives and enable their offensive operations massively. Frankly, I'm a bit mystified that it's not happening already. Third, this is another blow against the idea that the victories of this counteroffensive are happening in the "grey zone" of the Russian occupation. The Russians are clearly deploying their troops forward of their entrenchments and fighting for every inch of land. That might(emphasis on "might") mean that Ukraine has an easier task ahead of it than those red-line maps imply.

A final, extremely speculative note: the casualty assessment reported here is positive for Ukraine. More than 12 Russian casualties vs. probably about 24 or so Ukrainian casualties (6 dead, 1:3 KIA/WIA ratio) implies that Ukrainians are overperforming the assumption that the attacker takes 3 times as many casualties as the defender. Obviously, this is very speculative. Casualty estimates are always unreliable, especially when talking about such a tiny sliver of the battlefield. There are certainly areas where the ratio is equally lopsided in favor of the Russians. But it's an interesting data point that I wanted to at least mention.

These aren't all the takeaways. I strongly recommend reading through the article as a whole.

The Ukrainian soldiers thought the Russians would quickly retreat from Neskuchne, a tiny village in southern Ukraine, especially after a concerted artillery barrage and a rocket strike on their headquarters.

Instead, the Russians dug in, fighting for two days before giving up the village last month, leaving their dead decaying on the roadside and piles of expended ammunition around their makeshift defenses.

The Russian defeat, on June 9, was Ukraine’s first win in a prolonged counteroffensive that is well into its fourth week but moving at a slower pace than expected. In that respect, the battle for Neskuchne served as an early warning that Kyiv’s and the Western allies’ hopes for a quick victory were unrealistic and that every mile of their drive into Russian-occupied territory would be grueling and contested.