An old maxim says that "armies are always ready for the previous war" ;. After all, in 1870-1871 rising power Prussia gave complacent French Emperor Napoleon III a war lesson, crushing his army in a matter of weeks with modern tactics and advanced guns and rifles, allowing for the unification of Germany. Four decades later, when the First World War broke out in late June 1914, the expectation was that the men would return home for the harvest. But they remain in the trenches for nearly four and a half years. However, these defensive facilities and weapons such as machine guns make lightning offensives very difficult and lead to positional warfare. When World War II broke out two decades later, France hoped the "Magino" again to stop the German drive. But in practice, new weapons such as tanks and airplanes allowed the Wehrmacht to overrun the French army in a matter of weeks.
After the deadliest conflict in human history, Europe had not been the scene of a major conventional war for nearly eight decades, and for many it was simply not unthinkable. Despite the bell tolled by the wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
ON THE EVE OF WAR
When he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin probably realized that the so-called called a special military operation will last several days, similar to the five-day war against Georgia in 2008. or the annexation of Crimea. But the war has been going on for 1000 days, and its end is not in sight.
In the years leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, Russia conducted the above rapid operations, and in 2015 intervened militarily in Syria, where, together with Iran, it played a decisive role in the survival of power of President Bashar al-Assad.
This gave the impression that the Russian army had the much-needed combat experience. Only until 2022. she had faced virtually no equals and had not had to engage in conventional combat. Moreover, in Ukraine, unlike in 2014. an adversary, prepared and warned by Western intelligence, was waiting for her.
In the years leading up to the outbreak of war, Russia boasted formidable weapons such as its hypersonic missiles. But it turns out that no one knows what a major conventional war would look like - eight decades after the weapons fell silent in 1945. And these same theoretically formidable missiles never played a decisive role. Nor can Russian warplanes operate over Ukraine, which is supplied with air defenses by the West, as undisturbed as over Syria, where the various rebel groups and jihadists battling government forces have little more than hand-launched missiles. And in practice, Ukraine, devoid of a military fleet, countered extremely successfully with its drones and unmanned cutters against the Russian warships, which in practice turned out to be just large moving targets.
When Russian tanks rolled into the neighboring country, common sense said that the capital, Kiev, would fall soon, and the rest of Ukraine would not hold out for long against a much larger adversary, notes the Associated Press. However, that narrative quickly became a thing of the past. The Ukrainian army has proven that it is capable of slowing down the advance of the Russian armed forces, and although it has not pushed them out completely, with enough support from the West, it does not allow defeat, summarizes the AP.
THE MAIN CONCLUSIONS AFTER 1000 DAYS OF WAR
The nature of the hostilities quickly left the previously vaunted weapons in the background and launched "new stars" into the spotlight. First of all, drones, which had already played a key role in Azerbaijan's victory in its war against Armenia in 2020. Rockets fired from hand-held launchers proved effective against tanks, and fast-moving small groups of soldiers with relative operational freedom inflicted heavy losses on large, unwieldy Russian units obeying a strict hierarchy.
The conflict clearly demonstrates dramatic changes in the very essence of war in five main ways, the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War summarizes on its website.
1) The effectiveness of integrated air defense against intense and sophisticated air/missile attacks.
It was also proven by the limited nature of the damage in Iranian airstrikes against Israel this year. In fact, the Israeli army proved its military superiority over "Hezbollah" as well, inflicting heavy damage on the Iranian-backed Lebanese movement. It is no coincidence that during a visit to Lebanon late last week, adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Ali Larijani, quoted by Reuters, expressed support for the ceasefire talks - a visible retreat from Tehran's bellicose rhetoric.
2) The capacity of huge masses of tactical drones – millions of unmanned aerial vehicles used by both sides in the Ukrainian conflict - to create partially transparent battlefields and limit the battle to positional formations.
The key importance of drones, which was evident at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, led to the rapid development of these technologies. As a result, both sides have acquired large stockpiles of unmanned aerial vehicles that carry out nightly swarm attacks, under the cover of darkness and difficult to detect by radar.
On Saturday and Sunday, Russia carried out one of its most massive airstrikes against Ukraine, which also responded with deadly attacks.
Swarms of Russian drones are undermining the defense and morale of Ukrainians, the BBC summarizes.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, however, cannot decide the outcome of the war by themselves. Because until the infantry sets foot in a given settlement, it is not captured.
Drones, however, turn the transparent battlefield into hell for soldiers and a real nightmare for civilians as well. After all, there are a number of cases of targeted attacks against civilians - attacks that have no military meaning
3) Integrated missile and drone attacks, both air and sea, are effective in delivering lethal attacks.
Indicative in this regard are the Ukrainian attacks by unmanned cutters against large Russian warships and by unmanned aerial vehicles against Russian critical infrastructure thousands of kilometers from Ukraine.
4) Expanding electronic warfare capabilities to scales and effects never before seen in combat.
However, some of the drones that are difficult to detect and take down are simply neutralized by jamming the signal. Logic suggests that in the future it is the means of radio-electronic warfare that will be crucial to dealing with this sinister threat. Just as drones proved key to neutralizing the dreaded World War II tanks.
5) The emergence of an extremely rapid cycle of technological and tactical innovation on the battlefield, driven largely by the race in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles and electronic warfare, which can lead to major changes on a thousand-kilometer long front line in just two or three weeks.
ZELENSKY'S CONCLUSIONS
In an interview broadcast yesterday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky assured that "the army (of his country) is one of the strongest in the world and certainly the strongest in Europe". He listed a number of reasons that, in his opinion, led to this: the supply of various weapons from partners, the active development of Ukrainian drones, the country's missile program and the acquisition of combat experience in a "major modern war".
Underscoring the importance of unmanned aerial vehicles, Zelensky announced that in the Ukrainian defense budget for next year, 775 billion hryvnias (nearly 18 billion euros) are planned for the production of such, as well as for internal orders in the field of defense.
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Earlier it was reported that Ukraine's drone production capacity increased this year more than 10 times on an annual basis, Ukrinform notes.
HOW WILL THE WAR END
Some parallels can be drawn between the Ukrainian conflict and the First World War. Both then and now, technological advances give the defending side an advantage (trenches, fortifications and machine guns a century ago versus trenches and fortifications again plus drones and anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons now). As a result, even now it has come to a positional war, in which each of the two sides hopes to break the other.
In World War I, the knot was cut when, after three years of trench warfare, the new world power, the United States, intervened on the side of France and its Entente allies, although fighting continued for another year.
Such a scenario is now extremely unlikely, not least because NATO does not want a direct confrontation with a nuclear force. And so Russia and Ukraine remain locked in a deadlock of attrition. Given the incompatible positions of the two sides, for a long time it seemed unlikely that the conflict would be resolved through negotiations. However, the very election of Donald Trump as president of the United States seems to have stirred up the stalled diplomacy. Even before Trump takes office in January...
During his campaign, the Republican vowed to stop the war within hours, without specifying how he could solve such a complex task so quickly. The big question, however, is whether he will stop military aid to Ukraine. The US is by far the largest supplier of weapons to Kiev, and Zelensky himself has repeatedly warned that this support is key, along with providing troops.
It is significant that the Ukrainian president changed his rhetoric after the Republican election victory in the US. Under Trump, the war in Ukraine will end faster, Zelensky said on Friday, quoted by France Press. And a day later, he added that Kiev should do everything possible to end the war next year through diplomacy with a "just peace".