In a long and astringent analysis in Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle reviews how the Ukraine counteroffensive of 2023 went so wrong and why the Russian deep defense had so much success.
Along the way, Biddle incidentally explodes the myth that Biden significantly hampered the Ukrainian war effort by not delivering weapons fast enough. The fact is the United States went to extraordinary lengths to get donated matériel into Ukraine ahead of the counteroffensive, including working out deals with a number of European and Pacific allies to replace or order more updated equipment in the future for loans of older technologies in the present.
The U.S. was pushing Ukraine to launch its counteroffensive as soon as possible, knowing that the more time Russia had to fortify its defenses, the more difficult it would be to restore the momentum Ukraine had in 2022 and return the war to one of maneuver rather than one of attrition. At the same time the Ukrainians were delaying the launch of their offensive because they could not muster and train enough men or master or implement the combined arms strategies that made the best use of the weapons on hand. In this case, both the U.S. and Ukraine were “right.” The U.S. and Ukraine also disagreed on strategy, whether to attack along one axis or several.
Biddle:
The F-16, for example, is a 46-year-old platform that would not be survivable in Ukraine’s air defense environment. The United States and NATO are replacing it with more advanced F-35 fighter jets precisely because it is too vulnerable. Although the F-16 has been modernized since its introduction in 1978 and it would be an upgrade to Ukraine’s even older and less survivable Soviet-era MIG-29s, a fleet of F-16s would not give Ukraine air superiority in any way that could create a breakthrough on the ground.
ATACMS missiles would have enabled Ukraine to strike deeper targets, especially in Russian-held Crimea, and this would have reduced the efficiency of the Russian logistical system in particular. But all weapons have countermeasures, and the Russians have already proved adept at countering the GPS guidance that ATACMS uses to hit its targets. The shorter-range HIMARS missile system was highly effective for Ukraine when first introduced to the war in 2022 but is now much less so, in part because the Russians have reduced their reliance on large supply nodes within the weapon’s reach but also because they have learned to jam the GPS signals that both missile systems use for guidance.
Similar “better but not near good enough” logic applies to tanks and other systems that could not be delivered in time for the offensive.
But more troubling, perhaps, is Biddle’s larger speculations about the lessons from this war. Namely, that Russia has been able to take advantage of “quantity over quality,” and the U.S. military advantage is built entirely on quality — using high-leverage techniques and technology when the battlefield opportunities allow their use. More Biddle:
This has produced a military with the skills and equipment to exploit offensive opportunities when they present themselves, as they did in Kuwait in 1991 and may do again in the future. But if the conditions are not right and attrition warfare results, today’s U.S. military is not built to sustain the losses this could produce. The United States suffered fewer than 800 casualties in 1991 and just over 23,000 in 20 years of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. But in less than two years of warfare in Ukraine, each side has already suffered over 170,000 casualties. The United States has produced about 10,000 Abrams tanks since 1980; in Ukraine, the two sides together have already lost over 2,900 tanks. The United States is starting to ramp up weapon (and especially ammunition) production now. But to produce expensive weapons in the numbers needed to sustain Ukraine-scale losses will be exceptionally costly. And how will the United States replace today’s long-service professional personnel in the face of Ukraine-level casualties?
It’s a sobering question and a sobering read overall.