Top American generals on three key lessons learned from Ukraine

WASHINGTON: It’s been two weeks since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, and a conflict that some expected to be over in days appears to be stretching into a bloody and protracted war.

While President Joe Biden has repeatedly stated that the US military will not get involved, senior US defense officials and military leaders have been closely watching the conflict to better comprehend the risk to NATO allies — and to understand how the nature of warfare may be changing. And thanks to a series of public hearings and events, some of those assessments have entered the public sphere.

Here, then, are the lessons learned from the first two weeks of conflict in Ukraine, as identified by three key American officers.

Logistics Are Not Optional

It took months for Russian President Vladimir Putin to amass more than 175,000 Russian troops on the Ukrainian border. But since those forces mobilized on Feb. 23, the Russian military has been embarrassed by one logistical failure after another.

Videos posted on social media showed lines of tanks and military vehicles stalled on Ukrainian roads, with no spare parts available to fix broken vehicles and no fuel to get them running again. Other viral videos showed hungry Russian soldiers who had apparently run out of rations accepting food from Ukrainians.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian citizens have posted photos and videos of themselves with captured Russian equipment — everything from abandoned vehicles to air defense systems.

“We often like to talk about amateurs study tactics and professionals study logistics, and we see that play out right before our eyes,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said Tuesday.

“If you’re going to put an army on the move, if you’re going to conduct combat operations, if you don’t have logistics, if you don’t have gas, if you don’t have parts, if you don’t have all the ammunition, then those weapon systems become paperweights. They just sit on the side of the road and you can’t fight [with] them.”

Russia’s problem isn’t a technological one, said Air Combat Command head Gen. Mark Kelly during the McAleese and Associates conference on Wednesday.

Russian surface to air missile systems “are operating pretty well when operated by Ukrainians,” he quipped.

Rather, Kelly suggested that the Russian military is used to training on its own turf, where it can use its layers of air defense systems and other weapons to wear down an attacking force. It may not be practiced in operating in an environment where its own forces are disaggregated and it does not already have control over both ground terrain and the skies, which means Ukrainian defenders are operating from a playbook Moscow hasn’t seen before.

“I think — and think is a key word — is that they’re struggling with fighting Russian systems and they [the Ukrainians] are not adhering to Russian doctrine,” Kelly said. “But we also see the challenge of: What happens if your joint force is organized, trained, and equipped to operate with air superiority and not remotely designed to operate without air superiority? What happens when you don’t have it?”

Humble “Legacy” Technology Can Still Play a Role Against a Sophisticated Adversary

As the US military looks toward a future fight against a technologically advanced foe like Russia or China, the services have made the case for why it’s important to invest in cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, hypersonic weapons, and the next-generation of combat aircraft, ships and vehicles.

However, the fight between Ukraine and Russia shows that older, less advanced tech can still make an impact against high-end threats.

McConville pointed to Ukraine’s success in using relatively inexpensive, Turkish-made TB2 Bayraktar drones to take out Russian tanks and other military vehicles without putting human pilots at risk.

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“People envision that integrated air and missile defense is like a wall, that you can’t get through it. There’s ways you can get around it, There’s ways you can get through it,” McConville said. “You can suppress with kinetic [fires]. You can suppress with non-kinetic means. … You provide commanders with a lot of options and you also provide adversaries with a lot of dilemmas.”

The expanse of the Indo-Pacific region and layered Chinese defensive systems have put a premium on systems that can hold an adversary hostage from a distance. However, there is no substitute for positioning some forces close to an enemy, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger said during the McAleese conference on Wednesday.

By utilizing its intelligence and surveillance assets in Eastern Europe, the United States was able to build a picture of Russia’s movements and strategically release information about Russia’s plans, Berger said.

“I would offer to you this validates the need for a stand-in force to be forward all the time, collecting [information] against the adversary,” Berger said during the McAleese conference on Wednesday. “If we back up and cede that space, things are going to happen in there [and] we will be surprised. So, winning the reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance fight early on [is] critical, absolutely critical.”

The Human Element (Still) Matters

Russia has a 900,000-person military that dwarfs Ukraine’s and a defense budget to match, but Ukraine’s citizens have mounted a resistance campaign that has imposed a heavy cost on Russian forces, stalling their march toward Kyiv.

If one were to run a virtual wargame knowing how Russian forces were postured and understanding their capabilities, the computer model would have said Russia would be victorious in a matter of 72 to 96 hours, Berger said.

But those models don’t — and can’t — account for the Ukrainian people’s will to fight on behalf of their homeland, he said.

Whether it’s stories of the legendary (and likely fictitious) Ghost of Kyiv shooting down Russian fighter jets above the skies of Ukraine or the real footage of Ukrainian citizens making Molotov cocktails and distributing weaponry, Ukraine is winning the information war against Russia by showcasing the resolve of its people and contrasting it with the Russian military’s blunders.

“The discipline, the leadership, the fighting spirit, whatever you want to call it, models don’t account for that. They can account for a weapon system, they can do [calculations]. They cannot explain why Ukraine is still hanging on. Why is that?” Berger said.

“We have to understand there’s a human component to fighting — a brutality. All the technology in the world allows them [Russia] to win, but it doesn’t replace the human.”

Andrew Eversden, Jaspreet Gill, and Justin Katz contributed to this report.