Is a Re-Conceptualization of Land/Air Operations Required in View of Lessons Learned in Ukraine?

The military-technological development is changing the character of war, according to a number of futures studies from NATO’s Allied Command Transformation and others. Several of the pre-dictions made in these studies are confirmed by lessons learned from the war in Ukraine. The report seeks to verify this presumption through an assessment of the impact of technological de-velopment on the three basic elements of land warfare; fire, protection and manoeuvre. Histori-cally, technology has affected these elements differently, thereby creating an asymmetric tacti-cal effect. Since the two major phases of war, offense and defence, combine the three elements differently, the impact of technology on the balance between attack and defence also varies over time.
In our time, it is particularly the technologies stemming from the digitisation of equipment and procedures that impact military operations. Sensors on elevated platforms radically improve sit-uational awareness and communicate with long-range precision-guided weapons through im-proved connectivity. Thus, a great volume of fire can be concentrated rapidly at any given point on the battlefield, even if the platforms remain distributed over a large area. This means that in-direct fire can be concentrated far more quickly than direct fire, which requires concentration of the platforms. Consequently, the balance between manoeuvre and fire support capability in a ground formation shifts in favour of over-the-horizon fire support, which takes on a greater and more independent operational importance. This theoretical assessment is consistent with devel-opment in Ukraine. When anything that moves can be seen, and anything that is seen can be hit, manoeuvre is affected more than the other elements. Hence attack, consisting mainly of fire and manoeuvre, is affected negatively to a greater extent than defence, which is in essence fire and protection. The essential principle of the offense, concentration of effort through the massing of manoeuvre units at the point of decision, becomes non-viable, because the units can be detected and subjected to devastating fire more quickly than the necessary concentra-tion can be completed.
When the mobility of indirect fires becomes orders of magnitude greater than that of line-of-sight fire platforms, and defence is enabled at the expense of attack, it affects the viability of the ma-noeuvre warfare concept. This generates a requirement for a new concept of land/air opera-tions, based on the pre-eminence of over-the-horizon fires and the strength of the defensive. Vulnerability of detection and destruction makes it impossible for a unit to remain concentrated and stationary unless protected by permanent fortifications. Both offensive and defensive opera-tions must therefore be conducted in a mobile and dispersed mode. The combined arms for-mation of future ground forces should be built around fire support units, conducting defensive operations as attrition of enemy units in a killing zone throughout the formation’s tactical depth, as opposed to engaging along a front line in the forward part of the OA. Offensive operations at the tactical level should only be executed as counter-moves against enemy units which have been attrited by indirect fire and should be based on dispersed manoeuvre units which concen-trate temporarily for the purpose of the attack, before dispersing again. This means that air mo-bility may eclipse armoured ground mobility in future formations.