The conflict in Ukraine is not a drone war. The ongoing clash between Russia and Ukraine relies primarily on massive concentrations of ground forces. They form the core of the ongoing mega-battle. That is why, by decree on 1 December 2023, Putin increased the strength of his forces to 1.32 million soldiers, and in September 2024 raised it to 1.5 million. There are now over 470,000 Russian sołdaty on the front. And the Ukrainian army today numbers more than 900,000 soldiers, which is more than the combined forces of Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Sweden and Finland. Contrary to sensational myths, it is not drones but those ground forces, dug into the terrain, supported by heavy equipment and reconnaissance systems, that are fighting this great “war of attrition”, writes Piotr Grochmalski in Gazeta Polska.
All the claims that a radical, revolutionary change in the nature of the conflict has occurred, requiring NATO armies to undergo sweeping transformation, depart from reality. In fact, the Kremlin has forced fundamental legal changes that open the door to broad use of reservists on the battlefield. The Commission for Legislative Activity of the Government Office of the Russian Federation approved on 13 October a draft amendment from the Ministry of Defence that allows the armed forces to use reservists on a mass scale for expeditionary missions outside Russia without an official mobilization declared by the Kremlin or without a formal declaration of war. As analysts at ISW note, this means “a significant change in Russian law, which currently prohibits the use of reservists in the absence of an official mobilization or a formal declaration of war. The draft amendment also introduces a new category of armed forces formations called ‘special formations’, during which mobilized reservists will train for no longer than two months before being sent to fight.”
As the distinguished American expert Dr. Amos C. Fox, retired US Army lieutenant colonel, observes, it is a myth that the Ukrainian conflict has caused some revolutionary change that will make land forces equipped with tanks, armored vehicles and strong artillery irrelevant. Amos C. Fox states, “Future wars will still be fought for territory. They will still be fought by armies, or at least combined forces fighting on land, for land. Attacked from above, they will seek shelter on land – whether in bunkers, trenches or urban areas. It has been empirically proven that air attacks are less effective against ground forces hiding below the surface or in urban terrain. Thus, to defeat an enemy army holding contested ground, counterattack will not be the road to success in future operational environments. To win future wars, Western armies will need strong and resilient land forces capable of meeting the unique challenges of land warfare while exploiting the technological advantages available to Western militaries. Put simply, defeating ground forces will still require ground forces,”.
Tusk slowed the building of a strong army
Any kinetic attack by Russia on NATO states would be carried out by ground forces, because they are the primary and crucial tool for seizing territory. Moreover, the experience of the Ukrainian conflict shows how difficult it is to retake occupied land. Therefore, any ideas of abandoning the construction in Poland of strong land formations based on a minimum of six divisions, and ultimately ten, are elements of dangerous disinformation and diversion. During Tusk’s first team the army was reduced from 124,000 to 99,000 soldiers, i.e. by more than 20 percent. The situation looked particularly dramatic on our eastern flank. The armed forces also lost an entire command in the Smolensk hecatomb during peacetime, which has no precedent in recent military history. The United Right government doubled the size of the army, largely thanks to solutions created by Brig. Gen. Mirosław Bryś. However, achieving a 300,000-strong army was a strategic necessity.
As Col. Marcin Stachowski emphasizes, new military units were to be created in parallel, “especially on NATO’s eastern flank. Structural development was to be tightly coupled with technical modernization, covering modern means of combat in all operational domains – land, air, sea, cyber and space – as well as the equipment and armament of the individual soldier. In this way the building of a 300,000-strong army was not an end in itself, but an element of comprehensive transformation.” After Brig. Gen. Mirosław Bryś was dismissed by the team on 13 December from his post as head of the Central Military Recruitment Center, the expansion of the armed forces’ numbers was sharply slowed. Delivery times for modern equipment also lengthened drastically. The first K2PL tanks are expected to appear in Polish units no earlier than after 2028, but it is more likely to be after 2030. According to the PiS government’s 2023 framework agreement our armed forces were to receive 1,400 IFVs Borsuk (BWP) – including support vehicles. Tusk’s team signed an agreement with Huta Stalowa Wola for 111 units! This Polish design is among the most modern in the world. It is urgently needed by the land forces, but such a drastic cut in orders will leave the factory barely alive. And the Ukrainian war shows how important a domestic defense industry is for the efficient functioning of an army. These are signs that Tusk’s government is not only shrinking the Polish economy but has also drastically slowed the development of land forces and the modernization of the army. There is a real danger that this process will be portrayed propagandistically by Tusk’s team as an alleged reflection and a consequence of a sudden change in the nature of modern war. The media flood sensational information that portrays the Ukrainian conflict one-dimensionally as a war concentrated mainly on drone warfare. This is a big media deception. But in this barrage of disinformation it will be easier to convince the public that further purchases of tanks or infantry fighting vehicles are wasteful, because we must prepare for a new super-war whose essence will be massive drone attacks. Lieutenant Colonel Amos C. Fox warns against this madness. As he points out, “Although new technologies like sensors, drones and long-range weapons provide excellent complements to modern (and future) armed forces, their impact on the future operational environment will be minimal. If we set aside the sensational associations with sensors, drones, precision and long-range weapons, we are left with the basic idea of ‘attacks from above’, which have challenged soldiers since at least World War I. Currently, however, the West faces an additional problem, because most armies are moving to limit the involvement of their own ground forces in direct combat with enemy forces, while favoring the use of attacks from above as a supplement to military victory. Taken together, these two elements (i.e. ‘attacks from above’ and the reduction of ground forces’ engagement in combat) can be called a war of stalemate,”.
The revolution of war and the US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan
The modern shape of armed conflicts is the result of two concepts for developing the armed forces that were worked out under Andrew Marshall, director from 1973 to 2015 of the notorious Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon. Marshall viewed the modern military machine as a complex reconnaissance-strike system and laid the foundations of network-centric warfare. He pioneered an approach that dominated the West’s view of the armed forces – the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). As Dmitry Adamsky notes, “Since the 1990s security experts and defense practitioners have used the term ‘RMA’ as a general frame of reference for the changing character of war. To specify the innovations developing from the late 20th century and to point to their scientific catalyst, experts use the term ‘information revolution in military affairs’ (…) IT-RMA. It refers to the transformation of modern conventional warfare through integration of precision-guided weapons with command, control, communications and computers, and with various reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition systems. Operationally, IT-RMA created means for precision strikes regardless of distance, penetration of defenses using stealth technology and unmanned systems, and for horizontal and vertical communications to exploit the effects of combined forces.”
The demonstrations of IT-RMA strategy and network-centric warfare effectiveness were the first Gulf War in 1991-1992, NATO’s campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and the initial phases of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Christopher J. Griffin noted when describing the military dimension of the Gulf War after the conflict, “The nearly 1000:1 ratio of Iraqi to coalition casualties during the war revealed the devastating effects of American supremacy…”. It seemed that henceforth it would be possible to wage war from a distance thanks to precise missile strikes and overwhelming technological dominance. Russia and the PRC were stunned by the effectiveness of the US military. It resembled Napoleon’s dominance through the corps concept as a self-sufficient mini-army and imposing on opponents devastating speed, flexibility and concentration of superior forces at the point of attack. However, after these approaches were adopted by opponents within a few years Napoleon lost his strategic advantage.
Land forces return to favor
For the US the cold shower came with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when they entered phases of local insurgency. Both were the longest conflicts the United States has fought. They were also the most expensive. Their conduct required the commitment of increasing numbers of ground troops. In the end the US Army suffered two painful defeats.
Russia also tried to implement a network-centric warfare model. It also drew on the vision of Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, who as chief of the Soviet General Staff promoted the concept of contactless war based on modern missile systems, arguing it would put an end to armored weapons and land armies. Putin’s intervention in Syria was supposed to test Russia’s ability to wage modern network-centric war. The Russians also developed Ogarkov’s concept of a “reconnaissance-strike complex”, convergent with Marshall’s ideas. The Kremlin attached great importance to using Western innovations in modernizing its army and in its training system. The scale of Germany under Angela Merkel’s military cooperation with Putin’s dictatorship is gradually being revealed. It resembles the secret partnership that bound Berlin and Moscow after World War I. On Soviet territory an entire complex of German test ranges and armaments factories arose where both empires prepared for future aggression. Today we know that Merkel’s team committed to creating eight super-modern ranges in Russia. Officers from both armies were to participate in staff work. The result was a large training ground in Mulino, where land forces prepared for aggression against Ukraine.
The war that was supposed to end within a week with a brilliant Russian victory has now been going on for nearly three and a half years. Neither side is able to gain a strategic advantage over the opponent and return to a phase of maneuver warfare.
Its analyses lack realism and a hard confrontation with optimistic scenarios of future conflicts. As Lt. Col. Amos C. Fox noted earlier, “Today Western armies claim that stand-off warfare will be the way to win conflicts in future operational environments. The doctrine of multi-domain operations, Project Convergence and a number of other concepts focused on sensors, precision and long-range strike – dominating military, academic and political discussions – clearly confirm this. Nevertheless, 21st-century wars present an alternative reality…” As long as the goal of war is to control territory, land forces will remain the key to victory. This also applies to effective deterrence capabilities. The Ukrainian war shows that the foundation of our security is land forces. Of course they must evolve. As Lt. Col. Amos C. Fox emphasizes, “These robust and resilient land forces will not, however, remain the status quo land forces we know today. Robotics, combat systems and command systems based on artificial intelligence, and integrated man-machine teams should be used in the future operational environment to augment the workforce and increase human capabilities on the battlefield and in the cyber-data space. (…) The Russo-Ukrainian war shows that it is the major battles and campaigns fought by resilient land forces, supported by – and not subordinated to – combined forces, that are the way to win or lose a large-scale war between industrialized states. Armies are the fulcrum around which all military operations revolve and on which the political outcomes of a warring state depend.”
Media frenzy is not strategic analysis
The danger is succumbing to the media hysteria that wants to see the conflict in Ukraine only as a great drone war. Dara Massicot, formerly an analyst at the Pentagon and now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tried to analyze what the Kremlin is learning from the war in Ukraine. In a piece published in October in Foreign Affairs she argues:
“Many policymakers and strategists do not see to what extent Moscow has drawn lessons from its failures and adjusted its strategy and approach to war, both in Ukraine and beyond. Since 2022 Russia has begun systematic efforts to analyze its combat experiences, draw lessons and share them across its armed forces. By early 2023 Moscow had quietly built a complex learning ecosystem that includes the production base for defense equipment, universities and soldiers at all levels of the command chain. The military now institutionalizes its knowledge, reorganizes defense producers and research organizations to support wartime needs, and connects tech startups with state resources. The result is new battlefield tactics – codified into training programs and field manuals – and better weapons. Moscow has developed new ways to use drones to search for and kill Ukrainian soldiers and to destroy Ukrainian resources, turning what was once an area of weakness into an area of strength.”
The point is that a similar problem affects Kyiv, which is significantly better prepared than a year ago for a war of destroying energy resources.
Ukraine’s strikes are effectively weakening the Russian fuel sector. The author argues that allegedly “Moscow fears (…) that the United States and Europe will analyze its war and develop countermeasures against Russia’s latest capabilities and tactics. NATO must prove that these fears are justified. To match Russian capabilities and catch up in key areas such as drone warfare, the United States and Europe must accelerate their analysis of the invasion of Ukraine and then adapt, among other things by purchasing more unmanned aerial systems and deploying other innovations. Although several organizations in NATO countries devote themselves to drawing lessons from the war, progress is uneven and dispersed. The actions of these organizations have not yet led to a comprehensive change in supply plans, training programs or operational concepts of their countries.” This is a hysterical view that ignores the key problems of the contemporary theater of war.
It is obvious that Poland for many reasons should put great analytical effort into using Ukrainian lessons from Russia’s aggression. We must also build the army as a flexible learning system able to accommodate the following changes. Amos C. Fox rightly warns.
He states that “the first thing armed forces must consider is not to be carried away by media hype and the sensation associated with stand-off warfare. Drones, long-range strikes and precision fighting are merely ongoing challenges related to ‘attacks from above’ that soldiers have struggled with since World War I. When the battlefield is dominated by attacks from above, soldiers go underground. When soldiers go underground, static battlefields develop. When static battlefields develop, positional warfare replaces maneuver, and conflicts turn into wars of attrition.” That happened because neither side gained overwhelming air superiority. And most analysts believe that NATO would, in the first phase of a potential conflict with Russia, destroy its air forces. Amos C. Fox is right when he says that today NATO “needs resilient and robust, not light, small and dispersed land forces. (…) Small, light and dispersed land forces fighting in conditions of stalemate will not be able to defeat a dug-in adversary intent on holding (…) annexed territory. Air strikes, no matter how precise and skillfully applied, will not effectively eliminate those ground forces. Durable, resilient land forces are required to accomplish this task.” This also applies to Poland.