Are NATO armies learning the lessons from Ukraine—and from history?

By Alexander With:

Presently, 70 percent of all casualties in the war in Ukraine can be ascribed to drones. Manoeuvre warfare has all but disappeared. Instead, we are seeing a slow attritional grind with parallels to World War I.

The two sides seem to have all but given up on armoured breakthroughs. Instead, they slug it out with infantry, artillery, motorcycles and above all drones in large numbers. Yet in NATO, the emphasis is still on creating heavy armoured brigades. Generals and officers are dismissing the lessons from Ukraine with arguments such as “we will fight differently than the Ukrainians” or “the Ukrainians don’t have the ability to conduct multi-domain operations like we do”.

The two main lessons for land warfare from Ukraine have been that to fight a foe like Russia, you need drones and conscripts. And lots of them. However, in Denmark, high-ranking army officers seem to be of the opinion that if the answer is not creating a single heavy brigade, the question must be wrong.

It would be premature to say which side is wrong. But historically, armies have shown a reluctance to change doctrine even when technology demanded it.

In the 1860s, during the American Civil War, it became clear that charging on horseback with a sword in hand did not work against rapidly firing weapons. The European great powers had observers who reported this back home. Yet the European armies stubbornly clung to their cavalry. It must, they thought, be the foolish Americans who simply could not make cavalry work. Only in 1914, during the First World War, did they learn that swords and horses against machine guns were a bad idea.

In 1904–1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, it became evident that bayonets and massed assaults against machine guns, trenches, and artillery did not really work. During the Battle of Mukden, 600,000 troops slugged it out in battlefield conditions not much different from what was to be seen in World War I. Casualties were horrendous. The European great powers observed this as well but again concluded that it must be the foolish Japanese who could not wage a proper war. Once more, they chose not to update their doctrine, and the result was a bloodbath on the Western Front.

In the late 1930s, the Germans developed their Blitzkrieg during the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland. The French witnessed this, but their generals believed that Poland’s rapid collapse was due to Polish incompetence rather than German skill. Thus they clung to their doctrine and lost everything in six weeks in 1940.

As Williamson Murray writes in Military Adaptation in War: With Fear of Change:

“The willingness to be self-critical was one of the major factors that enabled the Wehrmacht to perform at such high levels throughout World War II.”

This begs the question: Are NATO armies self-critical enough today? I am not saying that drones have made everything we do obsolete. But I am saying that we better come up with some answers to the questions posed by drones:

• How do we create surprise on an increasingly transparent battlefield?
• How do we make decisive manoeuvres when they are instantly seen and targeted?
• How do we employ sufficient force at the front, when the last 40 km before the front is under constant surveillance and attack from drones?
• How do we evacuate wounded personnel, when the area behind the front is more dangerous than the front-line trenches themselves, and when Red Cross armbands are viewed as high-value targets by Russian drone operators?

Until our generals can answer those questions, they’d better start learning how to fight like the Ukrainians.

About the author:

Alexander With is commander (OF-3) in the Royal Danish Navy and military analyst at the Royal Danish Defence College. His website is https://www.alexanderwith.dk