To destroy the power of the Russian Army in Eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainians' allies should help them target Russian sources of strength. Nullifying the enemy's advantages should be done cost-effectively, so that it succeeds more quickly. This requires a strength-on-weakness strategy—an asymmetric strategy, of putting precision on mass. Defeating the Russian Army means, in order of likely increasing importance, (3) destroying its ammunition, (2) destroying its guns, and in particular, (1) killing its gunners. Whether the US and its allies can produce enough precision weapons in short order to attrit Russian power in these ways may substantially determine the outcome of this war. This is wartime thinking, for a wartime problem.
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In his famous book The American Way of War (Macmillan, 1973), Russell Weigley argued that from its Civil War through the Vietnam War, US military strategists preferred strategies of annihilation, as practiced first by Sherman and Grant. They preferred this over both Bonaparte's strategy of decision through battle, as pursed by Lee in the Civil War, and talked up more recently through the "maneuver warfare" strategies of the US Marine Corps. They also preferred this over strategies of attrition, as pursued by Washington in the Revolutionary War. (I thank Joseph Stieb of Ohio State University for some of that summary.) Notably, Weigley was writing as the Vietnam war was winding down to ill effect, and just before the US military started completely rethinking its approach. Its thirty-year enthusiasm for precision is a technological strategy, but one which has held some promise of returning American strategy to that colonial and Washingtonian respect for attrition.
Much has been written since of how the experience of Vietnam and the threat of the massive Soviet war machine led US planners and industrialists to conceive and develop precision weapons. Meeting the Soviets tank-for-tank and cannon-for-cannon was stupid if the tanks and canons could be dispatched with precision aerial bombardment. Michael Rip and I chronicled some aspects of this development in our 2002 book from the Naval Institute, The Precision Revolution. As we observed therein, the Russian military was veritably shocked by the speed and thoroughness by which the US military defeated the Iraqi military—an armed force which their Soviet forerunners had equipped and trained. Note that attrition need not proceed slowly
Whatever their shock and awe at the time, Russians did not really internalize the message. The book jacket of Benjamin Lambeth's Russia's Air Power in Crisis (Smithsonian, 1999) rather explains the problem, at the end of the comparative chaos of the 1990s:
although the VVS [Air Force] is key to Russia's future military capability, it is unlikely to regain even a semblance of its Cold War strength in the near term... only the stabilization of Russian society as a whole could foster a renaissance of Russian air power.
By the 2010s, we were hearing much from other pundits and experts about the Gerasimov Doctrine and the Shoigu Reforms. The progenitors of these eponymous concepts, people have suddenly remembered, are absolutely products of Putin's kleptocratic system. Of course, the problem with kleptocracy, to paraphrase Lady Thatcher, is that you eventually run out of money to steal. There was no stabilization—just a subjugation by Bortnikov's Federal Security Service.
As Lambeth showed, military air arms are challenging formations to equip, train, and operate. Add precisions weapons, and the intelligence and planning requirements increase remarkably. The Russians never tried that hard. Apart from those mostly aging anti-ship and anti-aircraft guided missiles, the Russians never invested the money to make many. After all the vodka and yachts and alpine chalets, there wasn't much left. By early May, as Tara Copp was reporting for Defense One, the Russians had "blown through" most of their precision weaponry. Without precision weapons, those very expensive modern aircraft are of questionable economic value before defenses with anti-aircraft missiles. It is thus unsurprising that the Russian Air Force is actually not the main problem in the war, and that most of the destruction is being rained down, with little discrimination, by the cannons and rockets of the Russian Army, and with notably unguided munitions.
On the other hand, the Ukrainians report that the Russians have far more artillery, in both cannons and rocket launchers, and vast quantities of ammunition left over from the permanent war economy of the Soviet Union. As Jeff Shogol of Task & Purpose entitled his story on the issue, "Russia is hammering Ukraine with up to 60,000 artillery shells and rockets every day" (13 June 2022). It's all reminiscent of that scene in the 1992 film adaptation of James Fennimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, when Colonel Munro (Maurice Roëves), commander of Fort William Henry, is asked by the visiting Major Hayward as to "the situation"—
The situation is that his guns are bigger than mine and he has more of them. We keep our heads down while his troops dig 30 yards of trench a day. When those trenches are 200 yards from the fort and within range, he'll bring in his 15-inch mortars, lob explosive rounds over our walls, and pound us to dust.
From what we read, that's similar to the Donbas these days. What Vadym Skibitsky, head of Ukrainian Military Intelligence, called the "artillery war" is entirely about the weight of shot: the Russian approach to taking towns is simply to blast all the buildings into rubble, and to then attempt to occupy the ruins with what little dismounting infantry they have. Remember all that yammering about the supposed genius of the "battalion tactical group" concept? As Michael Kofman and Rob Lee of the Center for Naval Analysis and Rob Lee of King’s College London have written, Russian motorized rifle battalions today generally have fewer than 300 soldiers. Now, the problem is not what one calls a unit of 300 soldiers. The problem, rather, is driving vehicles enough for 600, to the exclusion of dismounts. Those battalions have not many more troops than are needed to crew the vehicles and fire the small-caliber cannons. (On all this, see "Not Built for Purpose: The Russian Military's Ill-Fated Force Design," War On The Rocks, 2 June 2022.) The Russian Army is thus an artillery army for the Russian generals' artillery war.
In contrast, General Skibitsky pleads that the Ukrainians are "almost out of ammunition" (Isobel Koshiw, The Guardian, 10 June 2022). That may be the Ukrainians' greatest weakness, and it's a big one. At least they have thousands of smart, patriotic, and enthusiastic combatants staffing their armed forces, many of whom are remarkable resourceful with adapted, modern technology. That represents impressive progress in just the past few years. The first hundred days of this campaign have demonstrated that the Russian success in Crimea in was attained by small numbers of professionals, well-equipped with foreign technology, against opponents who were lamentably disorganized. That assessment in turn reveals the great weaknesses of today's Russian war machine: a shortage of skilled labor, and a paucity of information-age technology. Put precision on those, and the Russian fighting power may crumble.
The Ukrainians understand this. As my colleague Nico Lange at the Center for European Policy Analysis has just written, Ukrainian strategy seems "wisely driven by goals rather than territory," in an effort to "inflict massive losses on the Russians" ("War Update—And What Else Ukraine Needs," 10 June 2022). And while any knucklehead can be trained quickly to load 152 mm shells into a breech, not just any knucklehead can serve effectively as an artillery officer—even one asked only to prosecute area targets. The people behind the guns may be the weak link. The tyrant Putin greatly wishes to avoid a massive call-up of manpower, for fear of the unrest that could cause. His own cronies have acknowledged that training all that green cannon-cocking cannon-fodder would take many months. By killing the artillerists, and particularly their officers, the Ukrainians' remote-aviators and artillerists may be able to shut down much of the Muscovites' barbaric artillery offensive.
So what do the Ukrainians need? They have clearly and repeatedly told us: hundreds of tanks to retake ground, but also hundreds of cannons and rocket launchers, many thousands of precision munitions, and a thousand drones to find all the targets. The US has thousands of surplus tanks, all far superior to anything that the Russians can bring. The US has more cannons and rocket launchers to give. European allies have many fewer, but that is not the decision problem. Rather, the last two items on the shopping list are the problem. As Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners observed in a recent research note, even the US has become "an artisan, not an arsenal, of democracy" (8 May 2022). That must change, and quickly.
How the US and its allies collectively and seemingly massively under-estimated the requirements of wartime production of precision weaponry merits a serious political study. For now, the great task is expanding production, with wartime urgency. This means precision 155 millimeter shells and 227 mm rockets. It may also mean developing precision rounds that can fit the Ukrainian Army's existing stock of 152 mm howitzers, and even 130 mm howitzers and 122 mm rocket launchers. It certainly means equipping the Ukrainian Air Force with drones that can spot and prosecute Russian artillery batteries and headquarters units wherever they are found. It requires facilitizing armaments makers with production lines capable of much larger volumes than hitherto imagined. It certainly means spending a lot of money, but on the averages for past performance in procurement across the alliance, that shall be money well spent.
James Hasik is a senior research fellow at George Mason University, and a senior research fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
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