Armies will be able to maneuver on the battlefields again, but it will be bloody

• The war in Ukraine raises a difficult question: Can armies still maneuver to win?
• Artillery, mines, and drones are so expensive that they risk exhausting an offensive before a breakthrough.
• An influential think tank thinks it has a solution, but it won’t be easy.

“Firepower kills,” warned French general Philippe Pétain just before World War I. He was concerned that the would-be Napoleons of 1914, dreaming of grand maneuvers and crushing victories, ignored a crucial possibility: that troops moving in the open would be cut down of artillery and machine guns.

Pétain was proved right: firepower became so lethal that World War I armies dug deep into the ground just to survive, until new weapons—notably the tank—broke the trench bottleneck. But a century later, the war has come full circle: drones, artillery and guided munitions have made movement so dangerous that both Ukrainian armies have returned to trench warfare. Even Ukrainian forces lately Kursk Offensivewhich used mechanized maneuver to occupy nearly 500 miles of Russian territory, are now digging in.

Whether in 1914 or 2024, a strategy centered on firepower has a downside: it tends to lead to indecisive battles of attrition. Firepower can sweep the earth, but it cannot occupy it. At some point, victory requires offensive maneuver to encircle opposing forces and cut supply lines.

But is a maneuvering strategy still possible?

An American think tank believes it has a solution for Ukraine, as well as better-armed Western militaries. By temporarily suppressing the defensive drone-artillery combination that proved so devastating in the Russian-Ukrainian war, armies can once again maneuver to defeat their enemies.

“This task is doable,” he argues report by the Institute for the Study of War in Washington.

“It requires imagination, innovation and iteration. It requires experimentation with battlefield concepts as well as technology and tactics.”

ISW sees three problems in trying to maneuver in Ukraine, lessons that broadly apply to modern battlefields. First, Ukraine and Russia field armies large enough to cover the front without leaving gaps or open flanks, meaning an attacker usually has to attack through fortified lines (the study was written before Ukraine’s push across the Russian border slightly defended in Kursk. ). But drones, artillery, mines and other weapons made piercing enemy defenses so expensive that the attacker becomes too exhausted to exploit a discovery. And even if the attacker can punch a hole, the defender usually has enough resources to build fortified positions, sealing off the penetration and forcing the attacker to repeat the process.

This accurately describes the situation on the Western Front of the First World War, a comparison made by Ukraine’s top general after the 2023 counteroffensive. But modern technology has added a new twist: drones and guided munitions in what ISW calls — based on a Cold War-era Soviet concept — the “tactical reconnaissance strike complex.”

“TRSC is a combination of general tactical reconnaissance, primarily by drone; drone-corrected precision artillery fire; precision munitions delivered by fixed and/or rotary wing aircraft; drone-launched precision munitions; and a large number of FPV (first person view) loitering munitions,” ISW explained. While both the attacker and defender can use TRSC, it is the attacker who must break cover and expose himself to the open air.

In this conception, TRSC is dynamic, a cat-and-mouse game in which each side tries to jam links between enemy drones and their operators, while upgrading their own drone systems to defeat jamming. For Ukraine—or the U.S.—to launch successful ground offensives, it will need to exploit “fleeting technological advantages to disrupt the defender’s TRSC in support of the initial penetration operation and sustain the advantage long enough to create a mobile assembly that to protect the exploitative forces. until the planned climax and the transition to the defensive after they have secured their objectives.”

In other words, the assault force must be protected from jamming and air defenses as it whizzes a path through enemy defenses.

Some Western experts support the creation of mobile devices “bubble” in which troops would move safely under the protection of jammers, anti-drone weapons and other defensive systems. “The requirement is not to destroy them (drones) permanently or universally,” the ISW report said. “Temporary suppression of local TRSC will require the combination of EW (electronic warfare) and other counter-drone capabilities described above with effective counter-battery fire and other capabilities to suppress traditional artillery, alongside effective tactical air defense against attack aircraft with fixed and rotary wings. in predetermined sectors to allow the concentration first of penetration forces and then of exploitation forces.”

However, the attacker must be careful and disrupt only the enemy drones, and not the friendly ones. “EW systems must thus be designed and operated in a way that does not suppress all drone activity in the attack sector,” the ISW noted. It is still a work in progress for Ukraine, which also lacks advanced EW disruptors that can defend large areas of the battlefield.

The debate over whether the military can still maneuver also turns on a capability that is hard for Ukraine: fighter jets that provide close air support. It is new F-16s it mostly flies away from the front to avoid the Russian surface-to-air missile batteries that have decimated its air force. Instead, debates about the U.S. military’s maneuverability could boil down to questions about the effectiveness of its attack helicopters and Air Force jets like the A-10 Thunderbolt and AC-130 Ghostrider.

Ukraine may be able to make up for the lack of air power by using drones and long-range ground-launched missiles to conduct close air support as well as battlefield air interdiction to hit Russian reinforcements and supply columns just behind the front line and isolate the defenders. “Ukrainian forces will need to find ways to use the drone and missile strike systems it has to generate BAI and CAS effects in direct support of the penetration battle and exploitation phase of every offensive operation,” ISW said .

Even if Ukrainian forces are outnumbered by the Russians, Ukraine can also use shrewd tactics to restore maneuver warfare, ISW argues. For example, Ukrainian forces may judge the “culminating point” of Russian offensives, when the attack begins to wear off and the attacker is vulnerable to a sharp, timely counterattack. One such “backhand blow” the strategy was used with some success by German mechanized forces to stop Soviet offensives in World War II, although panzer divisions were eventually worn out.

Regardless of whether the ISW concept is viable, the cyclical pattern of military history suggests that the glow of firepower will eventually fade and maneuver will once again become ascendant. “The long history of warfare makes it clear that maneuver will eventually be restored to the battlefield, despite current challenges,” the ISW concluded.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds a master’s degree in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow it further Twitter and LinkedIn.