It is a common saying in military affairs that generals always prepare for the last war.
WW1 was envisioned as a repeat of the maneuver warfare of the 19th century, started by the Napoleonic wars. Only to turn into gruesome immobile trench warfare.
WW2 French war planners made the giant Maginot line fortification for a static war, only to be out-maneuvered by Panzers and Blitzkrieg through Belgium.
More recently, the US & NATO armies were designed for small-scale expeditionary war in third-world countries and found their ammunition stockpile, as well as industrial capacities, to be wholly inadequate for attritional warfare in Ukraine.
The same can be said for the US Navy, with China having 200x or more the shipbuilding capacity of the USA.
It will take several years for the US to rebuild its ammo stockpile (5 to 8 years), and that without any further consumption by Ukraine, or lately Israel.
But this article will not go back to the topic of military & industrial capacity I have already addressed occasionally.
Instead, I will look at how the Ukrainian battlefield shows us a whole new paradigm of industrial warfare.
And how this will reshape the world balance of power.
Later on, subscribers will receive a stock report on a defense company that is likely to benefit from this change and is still cheap.
The Previous Paradigm
The current and quickly becoming obsolete idea of modern warfare (at least in the West) was based on a few tenets:
Conflict between Great Powers is unlikely, and would probably turn nuclear quickly.
Air dominance is the key to winning a war.
Combined arms movement, as defined by the coordination of armor, artillery, and air power is the way to break through enemy lines.
Aircraft carriers are the kings of the seas, complemented by submarines and support vessels.
Large, for-profit industrial conglomerates produce the best weapons.
For the military personnel or aficionados among my readers, I am intentionally simplifying these ideas. Please forgive me for the oversimplification.
It must be said that these assumptions have always been on slightly shaky ground.
For example, Soviet and later Russian forces have always considered artillery to be of equal if not larger importance than air power.
And China has always put a larger emphasis on large infantry and a massive missile corps, structured as an independent force alongside the land army, navy, and air force.
As we will see, many of these assumptions are now increasingly challenged by technological innovation.
New Tools
The first thing that Ukraine has taught us is that the idea of maneuver warfare might be wholly outdated.
Of course, a lot of analysts still cling to the idea that every combined operation having failed in Ukraine is somehow only due to unique circumstances:
Russians are incompetent
Ukrainians are poorly trained
Equipment was inadequate
Not enough material was given to Ukraine
The lack of NATO air power is the problem
The interesting thing is that none of these address the ACTUAL causes for the failure of both Russian or NATO-trained and controlled Ukrainians.
ISR Dominance
The first reason is the incredible power of Modern ISR (Intelligence - Surveillance - Reconnaissance). Satellites, drones, AWACS planes, and other tools have made the battlefield essentially “transparent” for maybe the first time in history.
Each side knows roughly where the other side’s forces are. What they are made of. What they can do. And so on.
So the idea of launching a surprise attack to break through is just completely outdated. Any position of force accumulation more than 24 hours old is likely to be identified, analyzed, and accounted for.
Short of bringing a world war into space and destroying most satellites in orbit, this will not change.
For the record, this is a horrific prospect, as it could trigger a Kessler syndrome, and lock humanity out of space for eons, maybe permanently.
Remote Minefield
Little attention has been given to modern mining tactics. Mostly because little is less glamorous than mines in warfare. No fancy specs of tanks or planes to debate.
And frankly, this is a rather gruesome and inglorious way of fighting.
Modern mines can literally be “sprayed” onto the battlefield at will, from several kilometers away. Essentially, artillery shells spread mines in a given area.
So it has become a usual thing for any assaulting force in Ukraine to see the road it just drove being mined in their back, cutting all possible retreat.
Add to this the very poor performance of demining tanks previously assumed to work, and you get a completely frozen battlefield, where moving out of trenches is pretty much suicide.
Drones
The drone revolution is only getting started in Ukraine. I will explore the full consequences later in this article.
What we saw is an exponential use of drones from truly amateurish ideas to mass use.
At first, the Ukrainian army had an advantage, leveraging cheap DJI Chinese drones, the type you use for aerial photography.
Since then, the Russian army has introduced a series of innovations of its own.
And while conceptually interesting, I do not mean the type of tinkering that we saw at the beginning of the war which looked like this:
First, the Iranian design Shahed, repurposed and with improved guiding systems to attack fixed positions, from logistical nodes to power plants to training centers.
Essentially a moped engine fit for a Vespa scooter, cheap electronics, cheap wings, and you get a cheap ($5,000 to $20,000/drone depending on who you ask) way to wreck a target worth millions or even billions.
And then the more sophisticated Lancet kamikaze drone (or “loitering ammunition”). It can be remotely controlled and hit moving targets.
This drone has been responsible for taking out plenty of US-made tanks and vehicles, and its small size and cheap cost have made it very hard to counter with conventional air defense.
Guided explosives
While these weapons have been praised excessively, man-held guided missiles like the famous Javelin also had an impact. And if the war in Israel is any indication, even unguided rockets are excessively dangerous to armored vehicles.
In itself, this is nothing new since the bazooka and panzerfaust. But when combined with the other evolutions, it becomes a much bigger problem.
Drones force you to stay under the cover of air defense, limiting mobility.
Strong ISR means that the enemy has time to bring such Javelins to the right spot in advance.
And mines force armored vehicles onto narrow paths, with little to no maneuvering possible.
Failure Of Prediction
Why do military planners seem to always fail to innovate? Partly it is the inability of most military to process different paradigms, and a LOT of confirmation bias.
A great example in this excellent X thread on the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, a true strategic precursor of WW1.
The conclusions that were drawn frequently reinforced preconceived notions of warfare.
The French saw bloody but successful Japanese bayonet assaults, preceded by fire and careful infiltration, and came away thinking their own - far cruder - tactical methods had been validated.
The Austrians completely ignored the war's lessons on cover and concealment and drew their artillery up like they were fighting Napoleon in 1914. Russian artillery, firing indirectly from defilade positions they had learned at great cost to use, simply wiped them out.
The British Expeditionary Force landed in France in 1914 with a mere two machine guns per battalion, weapons they regarded largely as tactical curiosities more suited to mowing down tribesmen than fighting "civilized" enemies in Europe.
The officers of that age have been widely mocked for failing to learn such seemingly obvious lessons, but perhaps we should be more understanding.
Our own officers seem to be dismissing the Russo-Ukrainian War as a bludgeoning match between crude Slavic armies.
Drones? A curiosity.
Electronic warfare? An afterthought.
Russian artillery? Crude.
Trenches? We'll -attack- them.
Russian air defenses? We have stealth.
Indeed, it seems very few observers are really taking notice that the first major conflict between 2 industrial armies since the Korean War in the 1950s is very different from the expectations.
Instead, they just assume it is a bug, not a feature of 70 years of technological evolution.
New Paradigms
Cheap Is Better Than Expensive
I think the first important change is that cheap beats expensive.
For a very long time, the idea was that technology wins wars.
Quicker fighter jets, better radars, more precise missiles, more satellites, stealth, etc… you get the picture.
What we see in Ukraine is that the most important weapons for both sides all share the same characteristic of cheap mass production:
Artillery shells costing $500-$800/unit for Russia and $8,000 for NATO
versus precision-guided shells at $68,000/round.
Small and light drone, at the largest a person's size loitering ammunition,
versus giant plane-size Predator style drone.
Cheap mass-produced tanks like the T-72
versus “better” but much harder to build and maintain NATO main battle tanks.
Shahed bombing campaign using $5,000 9 (or $20,000?) drones.
versus $2,000,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Quantity Has A Quality Of Its Own
A cheap price allows for larger quantities.
But this is not all such design provides.
Very advanced war machines require equally advanced components.
Top-level computer chips, esoteric stealth paints, ultra complex software, titanium hull, sophisticated jet engines, etc.
What happens if the ONE factory producing some key component of F-35 or Predator drones is bombed into oblivion?
Or if the supply of titanium and rare earth minerals, mostly coming from Russia and China, dry up?
On the other side, Shahed drones are for the most part mechanical parts from a 1950s moped bike, and electronics from the 1980s.
Which one has a more resilient supply chain, and can see production scaling up quickly?
Now let’s move to part 2 and the new paradigms in warfare.