The Economist had a series of articles recently about what the world is learning from the Ukrainian war. One of the articles is Western armies are learning a lot from the war in Ukraine. According to the article, the British army is running exercises specifically to learn how to apply the lessons of this war. I would hope the US army is doing the same.
Clearly land warfare has changed radically. Drones and satellites make the battlefield transparent. Precision missiles make possible pinpoint attacks on rear area logistics and command posts, and even on moving targets like tanks. AI and rapid communications make it possible to hit targets within moments of their being detected. We have spent decades fighting insurgencies against third world countries, and learned a lot about what to do and not to do in with insurgencies. But we apparently forgot what it was like to fight a near-peer in high-intensity warfare. One of the things we apparently forgot was the need for a massive wartime industrial capacity to keep up with the prodigious use of munitions, weapon systems, and supplies in a modern high-intensity war.
If land warfare has changed so radically, one wonders what we have to learn or re-learn, perhaps painfully, about naval warfare. Precision missiles and wide-area satellite coverage certainly changes the threat to surface ships. Are huge aircraft carriers still viable in a modern peer-to-peer naval battle, or are they just big expensive targets waiting to be overwhelmed by barrages of much cheaper missiles fired from hundreds of miles away? (Remember, one doesn’t have to sink a carrier to put it out of action – just damage the flight deck enough to make air operations impossible). Indeed, submarines may be the most survivable components of a modern naval fleet and perhaps we should build more of them. As it is, our U.S. shipbuilding capacity is currently so depleted that 40% of our fast attack submarines are currently out of service, awaiting maintenance (see article here). This would hardly do in a major naval confrontation with, say, China.
Air warfare has also apparently changed dramatically. The enormous losses of Russian aircraft and helicopters to simple, cheap shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles like the almost obsolete Stinger (last built in 1987, more than 30 years ago!) is a sharp lesson. Even supposedly state-of-the-art advanced missiles, like the Russian (supposedly) hypersonic Kinzhal can be brought down with ease by Patriot batteries.
And what about space? Modern warfare depends heavily on reconnaissance satellites, communications satellites, and geolocation satellite systems like GPS and Glonass (the Russian equivalent). The U.S., Russia and China have all demonstrated the capacity to destroy satellites – indeed all three have successfully tested such systems. How well would our armies fight without satellite coverage, GPS, and satellite communications links? How should we answer this vulnerability?
One of the observations of historians is that militaries tend to prepare to re-fight the last war, especially if they won the last war, often with disastrous consequences. Are we in danger of repeating this mistake?
It is also important to remember that the industrial capacity behind the military is as important, or perhaps even more important, than the fighting force on the front lines. And this “proxy war” in Ukraine has certainly shown how depleted that industrial capacity has become, not only in Europe but in the U.S. as well. As just one example, there is a single factory in Louisianan that makes a special type of gunpowder used in the primer of all U.S. artillery shells (the main explosive is not gunpowder – but a little gunpowder is used to set off the main explosive), and it is offline after an accident, with no urgent plans to rebuild it.(see story here). There are thousands of similar “single-points-of-failure” in the U.S. weapons manufacturing and support systems.
At the end of World War II the U.S. had 29 shipyards supporting the navy. Today it has 4, (Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility), all strained to capacity and badly needing updating (Dry Dock 1 at Norfolk, still in use, was built in 1834).
Today the US Army has only two producers of artillery shells (Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania and General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems facility in Wilkes Barre), both fairly antiquated by today’s manufacturing standards. All the shells are filled with explosive at a single facility in Iowa. These facilities currently produce about 24,000 shells a year, which is less than Ukraine fires in just a week. We are hardly prepared for a near-peer land war.
Plato said “if you want peace, prepare for war” (Sī vīs pācem, parā bellum). It is indeed expensive to maintain and train and equip an adequate modern military force (“adequate” meaning visibly powerful enough to deter potential opponents), but it is far less expensive than fighting a war, and far, far, far less expensive than losing that war. If we in the West had had the wit to properly train and equip Ukraine after the 2014 takeover of Crimea, we might possibly have avoided the current war altogether.
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