Many had high hopes for the Ukrainian offensive in the summer of 2023. Ukraine’s previous successes in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson have raised hopes that a new effort, bolstered through new Western apparatus and training, could break through Russian defenses on a larger scale and cut off the Russian land bridge to Crimea. If this were the case, he thought, the resulting risk to Crimea might convince Putin to end the war.
The effects fell far short of those hopes. Although the summer brought some Ukrainian successes (in particular, off Russian warships in the Black Sea), no breakthroughs occurred on land. Limited advances were purchased at unbelievable prices and have now been largely offset by Russian advances elsewhere on the battlefield. It is now clear that the offensive has failed.
So that? And what does this mean for the long term of the war in Ukraine and for the long term of the war in general? Getting solid answers will require knowledge and evidence that is not yet publicly known. But the most productive answer for now lies in how both sides, and especially the Russian protectors, have used their available forces. By late last spring, the Russians had adopted the kind of deep, ready defenses that were very difficult for attackers to break through in the last century of combat experience. . Breakvia was – and still is – imaginable in ground warfare. But this has long required permissive situations that are now missing in Ukraine: a protector, in this case Russia, whose provisions are superficial, advanced, poorly prepared or without logistical help or whose troops are unmotivated and unwilling to protect their positions. This was the case with Russian forces in kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson in 2022. This is no longer the case.
The implications of this scenario for Ukraine are grim. Without an offensive advance, the good luck of land warfare becomes a struggle of attrition. It is not impossible to obtain favorable end results for Ukraine in a war of attrition, but it will require its forces to make a numerically formidable enemy in what could become a very long war.
Some blame the United States for the failure of the Ukrainian offensive. Not all of kyiv’s requests for help have been granted. For example, if the United States had provided F-16 fighters, long-range missiles known as ATACMS or Abrams tanks earlier and in larger quantities, they argue, Ukraine could have done damage. The devices are becoming more and more useful, so the offensive would have actually progressed more with more complex weapons. But generation is rarely decisive in a war on the ground, and none of those weapons were likely to reshape the 2023 offensive.
The F-16, for example, is a 46-year-old platform that would not be survivable in Ukraine’s air defense environment. The United States and NATO are replacing it with more advanced F-35 fighter jets precisely because it is too vulnerable. Although the F-16 has been modernized since its introduction in 1978 and it would be an upgrade to Ukraine’s even older and less survivable Soviet-era MIG-29s, a fleet of F-16s would not give Ukraine air superiority in any way that could create a breakthrough on the ground.
The ATACMS missiles would have allowed Ukraine to strike deeper targets, adding Russian-controlled Crimea, which would have reduced the effectiveness of Russia’s logistical formula. But all weapons have countermeasures, and the Russians have already proven adept at countering the GPS guidance that ATACMS uses. used to achieve their goals. The short-diversity HIMARS missile formula was very effective for Ukraine when it entered the war in 2022, but it is much less so now, in part because the Russians have reduced their reliance on giant source nodes within diversity. But also because they have learned to jam the GPS signals that both missile formulas use for guidance.
American Abrams tanks are far superior to Ukraine’s fleet of mostly Soviet-era T-64s and T-72s. But so are the German Leopard 2 tanks that Ukraine used in the summer offensive. The Leopard 2s performed well but were hardly invulnerable superweapons. Of the fewer than 100 Leopard 2s in Ukrainian service, at least 26 have been knocked out; others cannot be used due to repair and maintenance issues. Like all tanks, the Leopard 2 and Abrams depend on tight combined-arms coordination with infantry, artillery, and engineers at scale to survive on the battlefield, and they require an extensive support infrastructure to sustain themselves in combat. Ukraine proved unable to provide these in 2023. Weakly supported Leopard 2s led the initial summer assaults but made little headway. More such advanced tanks would have helped, but the offensive offers little evidence that better tanks would have been decisive.
Others characterize the challenge to a broader military revolution in which new technologies make the battlefield too fatal for offensive maneuvers, independent of F-16 fighters, ATACMS missiles, or Abrams tanks. Drones, satellite surveillance, and precision weapons are the technologies that were all included in Ukraine’s offensive successes in 2022, as well as its offensive failure in 2023. And the observed lethality of these new systems, in their actual use, has not changed. It has been radically greater than that of past generations of weapons in more than a century of powerful combat experience. The experience of the war in Ukraine shows little evidence of a new era of technological dominance in defense.
Others emphasize education and strategic decision-making. The brigades that took part in the summer offensive in Ukraine were usually green formations that had obtained only five weeks of Western education before the operation. In contrast, the British infantry during World War II gained 22 weeks of education, then additional education in their combat units, and only committed to fighting afterward. Five weeks is not enough time to master the intricacies of fashion wrestling. Some U. S. officials also claim that Ukraine’s general staff has diluted the country’s combat strength by splitting its efforts. on three fronts instead of a single axis, which left troops on each front too weak to advance. Between the dispersion of efforts and the limited education of key units, the Ukrainians were left without the ability to make good use of the means at their disposal.
There is some truth to the arguments about education and decision making. As I explained in a previous Foreign Affairs essay, diversifications in the way forces are used have been greater than diversifications in equipment, so explanations based on the use of forces have plenty of reasons. obvious validity. But those arguments mean that if Ukrainian forces had been better trained and focused, they would have broken through in 2023. But if the Russians showed little offensive capability or motivation, they are now capable defenders. In 2023, Russia’s defenses were strong, well prepared, covered in vast minefields, supported by cellular reserves, and garrisoned by troops who fought hard when attacked. Breaks through defenses like these have traditionally proven very difficult, even for well-trained attackers with concentrated numbers. an effort.
The German Wehrmacht of World War II is commonly regarded as one of the most capable armies of the modern era on the tactical and operational levels of warfare. However, the German attempt to break through to Kursk in southwestern Russia in 1943 failed. of deep and well-prepared Soviet defenses. Erwin Rommel’s German Afrika Corps failed to break through the Allied defenses at Tobruk, Libya, in 1941, despite its air superiority and a major tank advantage, and Rommel failed to break through the Allied defenses at Alam el Halfa in Egypt in 1942.
In fact, it is traditionally very rare for attackers to break through defenses of this type. During World War II, the Allied armies, with overwhelming air superiority and numerical advantages, failed in the face of such defenses in Operations Epsom, Goodwood, and Market Garden and in the Battles of Monte Cassino, the Siegfried Line, and the Villers-Bocage Line in 1944. Iraqi armored offensives stalled even in the moderate deep Iranian defenses after the siege of Abadan in 1980-81, and Iranian offensives failed to penetrate deep into the Iraqi defenses at Basra in 1987. More recently, in 1999 the Battle of Tsorona between Ethiopia and Eritrea and the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 2006 showed a similar pattern, with mechanized offensives advancing slowly as they found deep and prepared defenses.
Offensive breaks occur. But they usually require a combination of offensive skills and a permissive environment created through shallow defensive deployments or unmotivated defenders or no logistical support, or both. The German invasion of France in 1940 knocked France out of the war within a month, and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 reached Moscow’s doorstep in a single season, but both offensives were made imaginable thanks to shallow and ill-prepared defenses. The U. S. offensive of Operation Cobra in Normandy in 1944 broke through a complex and generally superficial German defense. The Israeli offensive in the 1967 war breached Egyptian defenses in the Sinai in less than six days, but this was made imaginable through weak fighting. Egyptian arrangements and motivation.
The American offensive in Operation Desert Storm of 1991 reconquered Kuwait in 100 hours, but this was enabled by fatally flawed Iraqi fighting positions and the limited skills of Iraqi soldiers. Similarly, Ukrainian offensives at Kyiv and Kharkiv in 2022 broke through shallow, overextended Russian defenses, and the Ukrainian offensive at Kherson in 2022 overwhelmed a logistically unsustainable Russian defense that was isolated on the western side of the Dnipro River.
By 2023, however, the Russians had adapted and deployed a more orthodox defense in depth, without the geographical vulnerability that had weakened them in Kherson. And those better-designed defenses were garrisoned by combat troops. Russia’s poor functionality and low motivation to fight in 2022 had led many to expect Russian incompetence or cowardice, or both, in 2023, however, the Russians had learned enough from their mistakes to then come up with a much more complicated goal. Perhaps an attacker with U. S. -level skills and education has simply damaged the pathway, as those who emphasize education or operational decision-making tend to suggest. But it takes great merit in ability and motivation to break through those defenses. Ukraine did not earn merit in 2023 and it is unclear whether even U. S. troops would have the sufficient skills differential for such a complicated task.
The resilience of deep, prepared defenses in modern warfare will make it very hard for Ukraine to achieve a decisive breakthrough any time soon. For more than a century, this has required conditions that seem unlikely for Ukraine at this point. The commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, General Valery Zaluzhnyi, has characterized the war as stalemated, but believes that new technology can enable a Ukrainian breakthrough. He’s right on the first point, but probably not the second. War-winning weapons are very rare in land warfare. The difficulty of offensive maneuver in 2023 was not a product of any radical new technology, and it is unlikely that any radical new technology will overturn it. The enemy’s adaptation and the ubiquity of cover and concealment on land limit the ability of new weapons to punch through robust defenses, and Russia’s defenses are now quite robust. Ukraine’s prognosis depends heavily on the future of Western assistance, but even with continued aid, the conflict is likely to remain an attritional war of position for a long time to come, absent a collapse in Russian will to fight or a coup in Moscow. Success for Ukraine will thus require patience for a long, hard war on the part of both Ukraine and its Western allies.
What does this mean for the future of warfare more broadly? Offensive maneuver is not dead. But it has never been easy. It typically requires both a permissive defender and a well-prepared attacker. This sometimes happens: it did in 1940, 1967, and 1991 and probably will again in some times and places. But it is not easy to create a permissive enemy by fiat. And to exploit a permissive enemy properly requires expensive training, equipment, and officer preparation. The payoff can be great when these conditions combine: Germany conquered France in a month, Israel defeated Egypt in six days, and the United States reconquered Kuwait in 100 hours. But the conditions are not always right.
This scenario poses a dilemma for the United States. The US military has long favored quality over quantity. This has created a military with the capabilities and apparatus to exploit offensive opportunities when they present themselves, as they did in Kuwait in 1991 and possibly would do in the future. But if the situations are not right and a war of attrition ensues, today’s US military is not designed to deal with the losses that can also result. The United States suffered fewer than 800 casualties in 1991 and just over 23,000 in 20 years of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. But in less than two years of war in Ukraine, all sides have already suffered more than 170,000 casualties. The United States has produced approximately 10,000 Abrams tanks since 1980; In Ukraine, both sides have already lost more than 2,900 tanks combined. The United States is now beginning to increase its production of weapons (and specifically ammunition). But generating expensive weapons in sufficient quantities to sustain losses across Ukraine will be incredibly expensive. And how will the United States upgrade the current professional workforce in the face of losses comparable to those in Ukraine?
If quality can guarantee quick and decisive victories, the classic American technique makes sense. But if the lesson of the 2023 Ukrainian offensive, in light of experience beyond experience, is that deep, well-prepared defenses remain strong, as they have been for the past century, then quality alone might not be enough to warrant the kind of short-range attack. Immediate and decisive advances that U. S. defense plans have long tended to presuppose. Quality is mandatory to create opportunities, but it would possibly be inadequate in itself to achieve success. And if so, the United States would possibly want to reconsider its balance between quality and quantity in a world where permissive situations exist but cannot be guaranteed.