The NATO-Russia proxy war in the Ukraine has become a grinding mess. One reason is that this year, in contrast to most years, winter never really came. The result was only a two-to-three week window in which offensive operations could succeed due to the rivers of mud encountered at any other time when a unit strayed off paved roads. Then, for a couple of weeks in June, the Ukranians launched their vaunted “counter-offensive” against what may have been the most fortified defensive lines in history. The predictable – and predicted – result has been the annihilation of attacking Ukranian forces before even getting through minefields to the first Russian line of defense. More grinding mess.
However, in addition to the weather during the winter and the tactical stupidity during the summer, there appears to be another factor. The failure of air supremacy.
The recent “wars” fought by the US against far less technologically advanced enemies in Iraq et. al. were conducted on the premise that, after a few days, the US would achieve complete air supremacy, which it in fact did. Air supremacy, as opposed to mere “air superiority”, exists when you have (a) neutralized all enemy aircraft and offensive missiles, (b) neutralized virtually all air defense systems, and (3) eliminated any enemy ability to conduct airborne reconnaisance, whether from drones or satellite systems (neither of which these hapless third world nations had anyways). At that point, you can use your air assets – aircraft, missiles, and drones – to destroy any enemy that moves on the ground (by definition at that point the enemy has nothing moving in the air and no ability to interdict your aircraft from the ground). In addition, and importantly, it means that the enemy is unable to observe your ground force movement from the air, since the enemy has no more air assets, while you can observe almost anything the enemy does via drones, observation planes, and satellites. Meanwhile your own forces can move almost at will, since all they have opposing them is air-harrassed enemy ground forces and no enemy air forces or missiles or air observation. At this point, as might seem obvious, a Wehrmacht-style blitzkrieg form of war was not only possible but highly favored. This gave observers in those earlier wars the misleading impression that modern technology favored the offense.
However, what happens when neither side achieves overall air supremacy sufficient for offensive operations? What happens when each side has satellite communications and information, each side has drones for observation and attack – drone swarms, in fact – even worse if each side still possesses some residual offensive missiles.[3]
The answer up till now: Ukraine.
It now appears that, due to modern satellite-assisted precision targeting coupled with highly powerful miniaturized conventional warheads and/or drones, any tank moving visibly under contested skies can be destroyed within a matter of minutes. Think a column of tanks moving down a paved road towards a crucial bridge. The same is true for concentrated units of infantry. Any concentrated infantry units, far before they reach what an old rifleman would have thought of as the “battlefield”, is a target for almost immediate annihilation by remote missile attack, so long as your side has the air assets – drones and/or satellite observation – necessary to poinpoint the enemy’s location. The missile could be 1,000 kilometers away. It has been a staple of warfare since early World War II that air and often naval superiority is a necessary predicate to successful infantry and armour atttacks. “Without sealift or airlift, the Army can’t travel. Without air superiority, it can’t fight a winning battle. And without maritime and air superiority protecting its supply lines, it can’t sustain any fight that it gets into.” No End in Sight to the Army’s Dependence on Airpower (warontherocks.com).[1]
The point here is, when fighting a major power, it has become increasingly difficult to obtain prerequisite air superiority.
The war that is being fought, very well by both sides, is air “denial”. Due to very effective anti-aircraft and surface to air missiles, apparently neither side can consistently use airpower to strike consistently deep inside enemy lines – the Russians have been unable to interdict Ukranian supplies from the West and the Ukranians have benn unable consistently to annihilate Russian supply lines, although the Russians in June most certainly established sufficient localized air supremacy to mount a virtually uncontested and annihilating defense, all of it from air assets or artillery, against the Ukraine so-called “counter-offensive”. However, apparently neither side appears have a combination of precision missiles and targeting that would permit consistent successful permanently disabling missile attacks immune from antiaircraft fire on distant supply line targets. As an article in War on the Rocks puts it: “The skies over Ukraine resemble an aerial version of the World War I Battle of the Somme. In contrast to the first frenzied days over Kyiv, neither side is attempting to penetrate deep into the other’s airspace. Much like the machine guns in the French and German trenches, an array of surface-to-air missiles and defensive fighters would make such an attempt suicidal. This has resulted in an aerial no-man’s-land. Both sides trade stand-off strikes using expendable platforms and munitions, and both sides take pot-shots at each other along the front lines from extremely low altitudes, but neither side can marshal decisive combat power in the air.” The Somme in the Sky: Lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian Air War – War on the Rocks
Arguably, there are three stages of air control. First is air denial, in which one side has enough anti-aircraft weapons to prevent air superiority by the other side, but neither side has sufficient precision missiles to hit long range into the other side. This appears to be the current situation in the Ukraine. In this situation, for the most part, both sides can concentrate forces but face withering air power of the other side unsupported by their own if the strike into and through enemy lines.
The second is what might be called “dual air / missile superiority”. That is, each side denies its airspace to the aircraft of the other, but both sides have long range high precision missiles that can take out concentrations of infantry, armour, and supplies, including railroad tracks and roads. In this case, neither side can even concentrate infantry or armour, or supply its infantry, due to the long range precision missiles or precisely targeted attack drones or drone swarms from the other side. It is not clear what this kind of warfare would look like, but it would be analogous to the dual use of tactical nuclear weapons – namely, that until the other side’s missiles / nuclear weapons were wiped out, no offensive operations would realistically be possible. In addition, in this case, air supremacy over the enemy’s airspace has not been achieved, so an attack would also come under withering fire from aircraft of the enemy in its own airspace.
The third is actual air supremacy, where one side (a) denies its air to the enemy, (b) has knocked out all the precision missiles of the other side, and (c ) knocked out or depleted the enemy’s air defenses, thus achieving air supremacy over the enemy’s airspace. In that case, offensive operations can begin. It is this state that the Russians presumably hope to achieve before the autumn rains come by depleting Ukranian and NATO stocks of such weapons – i.e., via a “supply stock” war of attrition.
Three things are worth noting. First, neither side seems to have sufficient precision missiles to strike the other side’s supply lines and concentrations reliably. So “dual missile superiority” appears to be impossible. Second, the Ukranians – and NATO — appear to be running out of anti aircraft ammunition and air defense missiles. When that occurs, the Ukranians will be unable to “deny” their air space to the Russians over any part of Ukraine. Third, most of the Ukranian air force has already been destroyed. In such a situation, the Russian air force could dominate Ukranian, as well as Russian, air space. Under that cover, Russian forces could mass together both infantry and armour and engage in an attack of speed and maneuver. However air supremacy by the Russians is unlikely due to the remaining US satellites and Ukranian swarm drones, with which the Ukranians do seem to be amply supplied, many of them home manufactured by their intelligent and inventive citizenry. Whether the excellent electronic warfare capability against drones that the Russians have displayed in their June defensive operations might cripple Ukranian drone forces for a sufficient time to allow a blitzkrieg Russian offensive remains to be seen.
Lessons from the tactical nuclear era of the 1960s suggest themselves. The responses of infantry and armoured strategists to a tactical nuclear battlefield, particularly in ye olde Soviet Union, were that, to avoid annihilation, infantry would have to be so broadly dispersed as to be almost ineffective from the point of view of WWII style combat. Ditto the use of tanks. Accordingly, it would seem that the logical strategy for anyone wishing to have conducted an invasion, say, of NATO countries, would have been to destroy all enemy airfields and identifiable missile sites with tactical nuclear weapons before an attack. In other words, to establish air supremacy. Only then, it would seem, could a meaningful conventional attack begin. Any tactical nuclear weapons “missed” by your forces and still possessed by NATO, however, would, until used up, inflict devastating destruction on any concentrated units of infantry or armour.
It was for this reason that the conventionally inferior NATO forces from the 1950s on stored huge numbers of tactical nuclear weapons to force the dispersal of attacking Soviet forces into semi-ineffectiveness. The problem of course, from a Western European point of view, was that the use of these weapons on the battlefield – probably in Germany itself – would have destroyed much of Western Europe in the process of destroying Soviet forces.
Various make-shifts were proposed, the most famous being the so-called “neutron” bomb, which killed mass formations of enemy troops with radiation, but left buildings and factories standing. The theory was that these bombs could be used to defeat the Soviets without destroying 1,000 years of Western European infrastructure. Obviously, pain-in-the-ass civilian bystanders would have been killed as well, but…. most of them would not have been senior figures in media or finance, so presumably for that reason DOD “experts” felt the potential “on-side” human loss would have been “acceptable”. Due to political fumbling on both sides, the neutron bomb was never introduced. However, the final solution was the introduction of so-called “intermediate range” tomahawk nuclear armed cruise missiles designed to hit Moscow and other Russian targets. The idea was that, if the Russians invaded, NATO would destroy interior Russia, not Germany, with its NATO weapons. The fear and reversal of fortune induced by the introduction of these weapons was such that it quickly led Gorbachev and Scheverznadze to negotiate massive nuclear arms reductions, even while at the same time pulling Soviet conventional forces back to Russia and losing control of the Warsaw Pact countries.
Today, it seems that increased precision and satellite targeting permits conventional weapons to have the same strategic impact as tactical nuclear weapons, without the collateral damage caused by the “nukes”. The only apparent counter to this would be either (a) to deplete the entire stock of air defense missiles held by the other side or (b) to take out the other side’s (in the case of Ukraine, read “U.S.’s”) satellites, either via direct or co-orbital annihilation – which the Russians have been technically able to do since 1968 – or via the electronic disruption of the communications between satellites and missiles or other flying objects like drones.
This is a particular problem for the Russians due to their reliance almost solely on rail transport to supply troops. Unlike trucks (favored by the US), which can take dispersed routes by a multiplicity of main and back roads and perhaps, at least in some favorable dry-weather conditions, free range on a dispersed basis over reasonably good non-road terrain, trains are by definition limited to a tiny number of tiny geographic lines (the tracks) which can easily be precision bombed. Taking out 5 or 6 rail lines, even without hitting a single supply train, could cause a Russian offensive to grind completely to a halt. 5 or 6 roads, not so much. 5 or 6 possum tracks on wheat fields, no way.
Although NATO, with its US-style supply chain structure, will be better off from this point of view, at some point the supply trucks, infantry, and armor have to converge on roads to travel at all. Very few can travel over farm fields or through forests!. Without complete NATO air superiority, any such roadway formations risk annihilation. No less an army officer than Chief of Staff of the US Army and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley has just said the same thing in the July issue of Joint Forces Quarterly. Milley said: “Pervasive sensors, AI-driven weapons systems, and long range precision fires will make the fastest platforms seem slow and leave the most hidden formation exposed.”[5]
Could this presage a return to ancient methodologies? The “freest ranging” form of transport – in the least need of paved roads – is the donkey and horse. Could we be reaching the point where satellite targeting of 21st century missiles induces armies to return to the donkey, horse, and wagon, all massively dispersed over, for instance, the almost endless Ukranian plain, to effectuate transport? Or perhaps heavily laden donkeys, in Sumerian fashion, wending their obstinate, independent ways through forests and marshes as the “newest” in 21st century logistics? Although this may be an appealing idea to the few remaining living retired cavalry officers, it is unlikely. At some point, even the braying donkeys would need to converge to provide the mass for an attack. Of course, never underestimate the ingenuity of Army scientists. Perhaps a million donkeys laden with ammunition and automatic firing machine guns? How humiliating if the next Russian conquest of Berlin is preceded by a million braying donkeys spraying random machine gun fire while trotting down the Unter der Linden. However, even this “animal friendly” author views such an outcome as unlikely.
Absent the return to the donkey[*], could this presage a new era of standoff in Europe? A situation where, so long as neither side believes it can quickly get air superiority (complete air superiority being an unlikely event in an era of missiles) neither side can attack the other without losses so devastating that the defending power who has NOT mobilized (and thus concentrated) his troops may well be the victor.
This, by the way, was the view of many senior Department of Defense officers even during the 1970s. After the U.S. Air Force took out the Than Hoa bridge over the Song Ma River in just one run via a laser guided missile, 0811jaw.pdf (airandspaceforces.com),[**] some officials believed that the rapid deployment of similar electric warfare/precision weapons to 1970s NATO forces would checkmate any potential Soviet attack. Contemporaneous conversation by author with senior DOD civilian officer. Other officials were less certain, and all the war games still showed Soviet victory within 45 days of an attack on Western Europe, 1970’s U.S. electronic precision weapons be damned.
However, the level of precision and coordination appears to be so much higher today, that even those jaded (now deceased) officials running those unhappy war games might realize a new age is upon us, as the article by General Milley cited above would indicate.[2] See also Martyanev at http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2023/07/joint-vision-lol.html.
What this means for the Ukraine war may be stalemate, unless one side or the other gets nation wide air supremacy, including supremacy over enemy precision missiles and drones, probably through succesful attrition of the other side’s missiles and ammo.
What this means for war strategy in general in Europe or elsewhere may be that, when two peer competitors fight, effective offense is impossible using conventional arms, assuming each side is equally prepared for war. That could be very good news. In such case, all else being equal, the idea of 177 Russian divisions making lightning advances across Poland and Germany, machine gunning helpless farmers on the way, gunners yelling “and you thought Stalin was bad…ha, ha, ha..”, may more fantasy than reality, at least if NATO rapidly rebuilds its stock of truly high precision missiles against Russian concentrated supply and attack formations and enough defense, through dispersion and air defense, to prevent such stocks being depleted by enemy air action.
So, notwithstanding the devastation being inflicted on Ukraine, this could be good news for Europe, at least in the long term. Perhaps, amid the clouds of war, the era foreseen by the NATO commanders of the 1970s may emerge: a purely conventional capability as effective as tactical unclear weapons would have been in the 1960’s. For both Russia and the NATO.
However, that is the long term.
The short term situation may be frighteningly, and 180 degrees, different.
It now appears that NATO, the US, and Ukraine are fast running out of amunition and tactical missiles. The European war production machine is virtually non-existant. U.S. industry currently has the capacity to produce in years the number of shells and missiles that Russia and Ukraine shoot off in a month. Could we soon be at a point where NATO and the U.S. are completely disarmed for a temporary, but dangerously crucial, 2-3 year period? What then?
Does Russia finally take all of Ukraine? That may be the least bad scenario from a Western point of view.
Or does Putin pick his head off his desk and realize that, with all Western powers effectively disarmed, Ukraine is no longer the issue? All of Western Europe would be his for the taking! Russia could hold the desiccated remnants of the Ukrainian army (and Ukraine’s last remaining 100 or so NATO artillery shells and a bunch of burned-out Leopards) by means of a hundred thousand well-armed Russian troops inside their formidable existing defensive lines. While the Russian defense in that sector was distracting the West, Russia could launch a sudden strike, not on the rest of Ukraine, but on Western Europe. Russia could presumably temporarily disable all NATO European airbases with advance missile attacks, and send 600,000 troops west out of Belarus, not to the Ukraine, but through Poland to the Germany. What kind of defense could Germany muster, with its pitifully tiny 65,000-man army, now stripped of all its weapons gone by now into the sinkhole of Ukraine? Well, if the Polish in the meantime have been stupid enough to send their entire army into Ukraine to carve off some of Ukraine for itself, the path would be open, wouldn’t it, Copernicus? Could such a Polish attack be a “balloons up” moment for a Russian westward attack? From Putin’s point of view, the threat from NATO, ever more ominous to him, would be ended for good. He would have to weigh the risk that the U.S. could respond with the only weapons left to it – strategic nuclear missile strikes. But he might well be willing to gamble that no U.S. president would trigger a thermonuclear war that would annihilate the U.S. in order to save Germany from Russia.
Will Putin, like Brutus, believe that fortune favors the brave and that its tide must be “taken at the flood”?[4]
Notes
[1] Note this description of the period just after Dunkirk in France. “Germany possessed a two-phase plan to bring about the defeat of France. At the end of the first phase, the Allies had lost 61 divisions in combat without folding. They were short on equipment and armor, Dunkirk was encircled, and the French Air Army was nearing collapse. In May 1940, the French not only reconstituted two armored divisions but two entire armies (the 7th and 10th) that they used to provide a defense in depth. It didn’t matter. By June 10, the Luftwaffe had air supremacy and French forces were unable to concentrate. French leadership knew that they had to concentrate, and knew where and why. They simply could not do it because German air superiority meant that every movement was relentlessly observed and attacked. The French army fought on even after the French air force was gone, playing out a losing hand to the bitter end. As long as the Luftwaffe maintained air superiority, French maneuver forces were ineffective.” No End in Sight to the Army’s Dependence on Airpower (warontherocks.com) .
As stated by a German army commander generally regarded as even more capable than General Mark Milley:
“The future battle on the ground will be preceded by battle in the air. This will determine which of the contestants has to suffer operational and tactical disadvantages and be forced throughout the battle into adopting compromise solutions.”
– Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, The Rommel Papers
And think of this disconcerting message that was presumably read by Churchill after a couple of whiskey straight ups:
“We have the enemy surrounded. We are dug in and have overwhelming numbers. But enemy airpower is mauling us badly. We will have to withdraw.”
-Japanese message to 15th Army HQ, Burma / India theater, 1944
It may have enraged a half-inebreiated Churchill, but it is the way things work.
[2] All of that being said however, it appears Russians have no high precision missiles! In a recent Naval Institute Report, Lessons from Russian Missile Performance in Ukraine | Proceedings – October 2022 Vol. 148/10/1,436 (usni.org) , it looks as though Russian surface to surface missiles have an accuracy radius of 30 to 50 metres, not the 3-5 metres associated with high precision missiles. This explains why Russia has not been able to interdict Western supplies or knock out railway lines leading from the West into Ukraine. In addition, it looks like a lot of their material is built almost soley from non-Russian parts (drones captured and dis-assembled have Japanese engines, Sony cameras, and especially non-Russian microchips.) On the other hand, NATO appears to have supplied Ukraine with insufficient high precision missiles to permit similar targeting on a consistent basis behind Russian lines. In fact, NATO itself seems to have no more high precision tactical weapons, its inventory was so low (NATO also seems to have run out of standard items as well, like standard 155 MM artillery shells).
[3] Even if one has local air supremacy, that can effectuate an unstoppable defense, as has been the case in June, with Russia’s almost complete air supremacy over the small locus where Ukranians have attacked, that does not necessarily imply the total air supremacy necessary for sustained offensive operations across the rest of Ukraine.
[4] “We at the height are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.” Brutus, Julius Caesar Act IV.ii.269–276.
Brutus, of course, attacked off his hilltop and got creamed by the future Augustus and Marc Antony.
[5] Milley, “Strategic Inflection Point”, Joint Force Quarterly no 110, 3rd Quarter, July 2023, p. 6. (National Defense University Press). https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/jfq/jfq-110/jfq-110.pdfId. at p. 8.
[*] It is not clear how the incoming Kennedy administration would have reacted to a “donkey” gap with the Soviet Union. No declassified records to date shed light on this issue.
[**] Than Hoa Bridge just after one guided laser bomb run (1972). Even Norfolk Southern Railroad would hesitate before running a supply train over a bridge in that condition.