Stalemate: is the hiatus in warfare about to end?

A short while ago a view was ventured in these pages (The new hiatus in warfare, 13 July 2023) that the war in Ukraine had stumbled into hiatus. A transparent battlefield was being serviced by highly accurate, long-range weapons that meant any concentration of force, let alone decisive manoeuvre, had become impossible. As a result, Russian forces had reverted to grinding attritional tactics against Ukrainian defences sited in depth in a slow-moving slog characterised as “stalemate” by the former Ukrainian Commander in Chief, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. His candour may have cost him his job, but gave an accurate assessment of where things stand at the moment.

A view was also ventured that any hiatus must come to an end because, quite simply, they always do. Tactics evolve and terms of engagement shift in a way that creates new momentum on a previously moribund battlefield and Zaluzhnyi illustrated his point with a reference to the seminal example of the Western Front in the First World War. Something is certainly shifting in Ukraine, not only in the contact battle but also in terms of depth engagement and maritime operations, but is it enough to bring the hiatus to an end?

Along with millions of others, I found myself recently fascinated — and utterly morally compromised — while watching a luckless Russian soldier run around a tank trying either to find cover or shake off a pursuing drone, which seemed to be toying with him. Eventually there was a sharp explosion and another Russian fatal casualty. The fact that the internet is awash with snuff movies like this is an ethical and cultural commentary on our times, but that’s a debate for another day. The point to make now is that the contact battle is being transformed by the use of drones.

And, in particular, First Person View (FPV) drones, which downlink live video feeds to a remote pilot. FPVs are derived from racing quadcopters and were, at first, manufactured on an ad hoc basis in Ukrainian garages by geeky enthusiasts, but not any more. Two weeks ago, President Zelensky announced the creation of an Unmanned Systems Force dedicated to drone warfare, an outfit that can expect to have at its disposal anything up to two million drones that Ukrainian domestic production is forecast to turn out in 2024.

And they are remarkably effective. As a snapshot, it is claimed that in a one-week period in the autumn of 2023 Ukrainian drones were involved in the destruction of 428 pieces of Russian equipment, including 75 tanks and 101 artillery pieces. A skilled pilot can detonate an FPV at the exact point of maximum vulnerability on an armoured vehicle or fly it into a trench or bunker; FPVs can loiter in a target area, making them a persistent, insidious and morale-sapping threat that limits troop movements to small numbers under the cover of darkness. But they also have their limitations. Line of sight guidance is fine in the flat topography of the current battlefields but would struggle in, say, Crimea; bad weather can be disruptive and winter temperatures can play havoc with battery life. And the Russians have them too, though rarely employed with the flair and imagination that the Ukrainians habitually display. Necessity, it seems, has become the mother of battlefield invention.

As part of an integrated military inventory, drones currently represent a complement to conventional artillery and not yet a replacement. But that may be a fleeting condition, for a number of reasons. First, with GPS-guided artillery shells coming in at $100,000 a copy and FPVs costing around $400, the Ukrainians have found a route to both tactical and economic marginal advantage. Typically, Ukrainian artillery is firing 2,000-3,000 shells a day, about a quarter of the volume of Russian fire. Mass drone production will be an expedient way to make good that deficit — a process that, in turn, will tilt the balance away from conventional weapons.

Second, the continued adaptation of cheap commercial microchips and software means that intelligence will soon sit inside millions of low-end munitions, combining smart capability with mass in a way that has never previously been seen on a battlefield. Compare that possibility with current Israeli tactics in Gaza. Because of the inhibitive cost and limited stocks of high-end missiles and shells, the Israelis are raining dumb bombs onto a congested urban terrain and earning the opprobrium of the world as a result. For once, Israel is off the pace of military innovation and will pay a price accordingly. In the meantime, the battlefields of Ukraine are revealing the future.

Finally, and crucially, the glittering but chilling possibility now exists of combining the precision and abundance of emerging drone systems with the autonomy of Artificial Intelligence. The side that develops self-targeting autonomous drone swarms at scale will revolutionise the contemporary battlefield and most certainly have the means to break the tactical hiatus in warfare. The race is on.

It’s about 1,000 kms from the contact zone in Ukraine to St Petersburg, but distance is no barrier to the ubiquity of drone warfare. Open-source intelligence has reported the placement of a series of S-300 air defence systems to protect the city which is not only the historic capital of Russia and Vladimir Putin’s hometown but also – with the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk – one of two highly concentrated centres of oil production in Russia. It is part of the country’s energy infrastructure that has come under sustained attack in recent months. Unattributed explosions have occurred as far away as Gazprom facilities in the Urals, while verifiable drone attacks have taken place against energy targets in St Petersburg, the Baltic port of Ust-Luga and the Tuapse oil refinery on the Black Sea.

This faces Russia with its own Red Sea dilemma, in that it is being forced to deploy million-dollar weapon systems to neutralise nickel and dime threats. Weapon systems, moreover, that are no longer dominating the airspace at the forward edge of the battle area in Ukraine. And drone attacks bring the war home to the Russian people, with a vividness that no amount of second-hand reporting can match. There is also the reciprocal effect of allowing the embattled Ukrainian people to take some grim satisfaction in seeing the war taken to metropolitan Russia.

But these are all second order outcomes. The central aim is to go for Russia’s economic jugular — the oil production and distribution system that brings in about half of Russia’s $420bn export earnings — which, in turn, allows the continued prosecution of Putin’s war. As a device of asymmetric engagement, it is a thing of beauty, in that it creates a potentially strategic effect for negligible cost or effort and only calculated risk.

Then there is the deeply improbable maritime campaign taking place in the Black Sea. Ukraine, a nation without anything resembling a conventional navy, has destroyed about 35% of Russia’s surface combatants and submarines and forced the Black Sea fleet to abandon the Crimean Peninsula and retreat to the Russian port of Novorossiysk, some 450 km away from the traditional base of Sevastopol. This is the result of tactical ingenuity and instruments like the Magura V5 sea drone, which can deliver a 320 kg warhead over an 800 km range at a closing speed of 42 knots, guided by multiple sensors.

In effect, Ukraine has created conditions of both sea denial and sea control in waterspace that should be a Russian lake. Sea denial – preventing an enemy using the sea for his own purposes – is reflected by the Russian vacation of the battlespace, while sea control – using the sea for your own purposes – is reflected by Ukrainian seaborne agricultural exports now approaching pre-war levels. If there is a more extraordinary example of successful asymmetric engagement in a major maritime campaign, this author is unaware of it. Those members of the People’s Liberation Army Navy or United States Navy currently wargaming the future battle of the Straits of Taiwan: take note.

This piece is running the risk of becoming a eulogy to Ukrainian military invention, but has not yet answered its own question: is the hiatus in warfare about to end? It could, if the next great leap of AI-enabled battlefield drone operations could be achieved, at appropriate scale and without inherent susceptibility to countermeasures. That is clearly the trending direction of battlefield experimentation at present and the prize that every global military/scientific complex probably covets. But it remains currently elusive and the proximate effect of a drone-dominated battlefield will be to attenuate decisive manoeuvre even further and reinforce the hiatus.

In the same way, the elegant but cumulative effect of the deep engagement of economic targets is a declaratory long war strategy. How could it be anything else, given the limited scale of the offensive capability, formidable geography and what is likely to be increasing defence in depth? It does, though, have the advantage of engaging what is most likely to be the critical long-term Russian vulnerability of economic viability as war-related state spending approaches the levels that eventually bankrupted the Soviet Union.

Even the prodigiously successful Ukrainian campaign in the Black Sea serves mainly to negate what might have been an inherent Russian advantage, rather than confer an equivalent advantage on Ukraine. The outcome looks like an operational victory but a strategic score-draw, as neither side derives a war-conclusive edge.

So, it looks like business as usual for the immediate future. Indeed, it begins to appear as if Ukraine’s strategy is to use its tactical agility to endure a hard pounding over the imminent fighting season in order to re-constitute its fighting power in Year 4 of the conflict against a background of increasing battlefield lethality and Russian financial exhaustion.  To that extent, continued hiatus will serve its purposes and the condition is likely to endure into the immediate future.

And yet: the hiatus of late 1914 to early 1918 broke on the 21^st of March 1918, when the German Kaiserschlacht (Emperor’s battle) initiated a war of movement in the west and inflicted the bloodiest single day’s fighting of the war. Faithful to the German conundrum in war in the 20^th century, the attacks were tactically brilliant but strategically inept. The Allied armies held and then, beginning with the Battle of Amiens on 8^th August, went over to the offensive for the 100 days until the armistice of 11 November.

The Germans launched the offensive on the back of two factors: first, a change in the terms of strategic engagement; and second, because America changed its mind. The change in strategic terms was the result of the Russian collapse in late 1917, which led to the transfer of close to a million men and over 1,000 guns from east to west. At the same time, America overcame its isolationist instincts and committed itself to war; the Spring 1918 offensive represented the last throw available to Germany before the increasingly overwhelming Allied advantage in manpower and material would inevitably dominate the battlefield.

As Russia moves its economy on to a war footing and the West continues to vacillate about its support to Ukraine, it may be that the terms of strategic engagement are moving decisively in Russia’s favour. And, America may change its mind in November. We’ll see.

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