School of War - Ep 132: Michael Kofman on the Battlefield in Ukraine (War in Ukraine #4)

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

Michael Kofman, Senior Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and contributor to War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, joins the show to talk about the operational phases of the war in Ukraine. ▪️ Times      •      01:28 Introduction      •      02:14 A case of “Two Wars”      •      09:37 Operating on assumptions     •      14:54 Contingency and structure     •      23:41 Figuring things out in the field       •      31:22 Cyber is overhyped     •      39:56 Achieving a favorable outcome Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

This episode, a continuation of our mini-series on the war in Ukraine, today with Michael Kaufman, is a sort of companion piece to the recording we did with Stephen Cockkin a few weeks ago. That episode went through the phases of the Ukraine War to date, with a focus on policy and grand strategic considerations, if you will. Today with Kaufman, we'll do the same thing, but focusing more on the battlefield and the operational end of things. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

71941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who knocked these buildings down. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter. at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today. Michael Kaufman. He's a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program

at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He's also a contributing editor at War on the Rocks, where he hosts the Russia Contingency. It's a podcast on the Russian military and the Russia-Ukraine War. Michael, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for Iron Man, your podcast. You're also a contributor recently to, to war in Ukraine, conflict strategy in the return of a fractured world edited by our friend

Hal Brands. And that the chapter that you contributed is our main focus for today. But before we get to the, in a way, this is connected. But before we get directly to the argument you lay out in your chapter, I wanted to ask you a very big picture question, which is, you know, this is what you do. You focus on the Russian military. And all of a sudden, everyone is focused on you. Because as everyone is focused on the Russian military. What have you learned about Russia's military and its capacity as a result of this war? What assumptions have you had to revise? What has, what, what is the intellectual history of the war in Ukraine for Michael Kaufman? I mean, that's a pretty big open-ended question. That might be the entirety of the podcast right there. Well, let's go.

Well, let's go. So, you know, the way I look at right, I'm a military analyst probably first in terms of what they do professionally, but the job is ultimately interdisciplinar and involves looking military history, it involves thinking about strategy, it involves thinking about defense analysis of it large, and, you know, of course, a little bit, a little bit of theory to help inform the practice. I think that looking at this particular case, you know, at the Russian military, I really see it as two wars. I see the first 30 days of the so-called special military operation where the, The Russian invasion is fundamentally driven by political assumptions and is meant to be complementary to an intelligence operation that doesn't pan out.

And it's an attempt to employ the Russian military in a way that those of us who followed it were deeply unfamiliar with because it didn't reflect the way Russian forces trained, organized the fight, really the way any force were trained and organized the fight, right? It was meant to be a decapitation strike to affect regime change in Ukraine under the assumption that there wouldn't be a prolonged conventional war, and that fighting the Ukrainian military wouldn't really be the center of gravity. I mean, it would be initially, but so you could tell that the Russian leadership assumed

they could recreate the events of 2014, the annexation of Crimea, but on a larger scale. And then there is very much the rest of the war that I think is what everybody's familiar with now and has been observing for the last two years. So going back to it, I think that following the Russian military, We based, or at least I based a great deal of my knowledge on the evolution of Russian armed forces over the course of 2000s, right? We looked at exercises.

We looked at cases of use of force, the Russia-Georgia war, military reform modernization after that, the initial invasion of Ukraine, 2014, 2015, the Russian intervention in Syria, certain other limited operations. And we're trying to put together a picture of a sense of what this military could do because it's very much a force in transition. It had undergone tremendous process of military reform, recapitalization of the defense industrial base, reorganization of armed forces, but it was still very much undercooked, right, if that makes any sense. So to kind of close out the start, I think that where I learned a great deal was in the context of this war, force employment is the biggest to me determining factor when it comes to effectiveness of military. military power, right? It's not what you have, but how you use it. You can look at lots of militaries on paper and what they have on the books, and you can imagine them using it different ways. Some strategies are effective. Some are not. Some militaries are good tactically. Some are not. What I saw was first that the Russian military really struggled at force employment at scale,

on a large scale. And we hadn't seen them do that before, right? And as analysts, we tend to to work cases. So we always assume that the adversary can employ force at scale, even though We haven't seen it. That's the nature of applied work. We have the exact same problem with China scenarios, right? You've never seen China conduct a large-scale amphibious operation. They haven't been to war in two generations, but you couldn't say that they're just not going to do it, and we don't have to worry about it.

Like, no problem, we don't need to worry about this scenario at all. It's not a reasonable conversation to have either because you can be surprised. You have Pearl Harbor events. People said this about the Japanese before Pearl Harbor, right? that they can't conduct complex operations of the type of carrier aviation-based operations that the United States will conduct. So you can easily be surprised. The Russian military really struggled at first to conduct the operations of scale,

although it adapted and involved over time. The second was, I think, really overestimated the quality of the force, fundamentals, training, and that's partly because of assumptions that they had run enough people through Syria and had invest in training over the course of those years, partly just because of a real lack of visibility and because of how the Russian military does training, which has done at the individual brigade rather than a couple national training centers the way we might do it in the United States. I think they're enduring cultural issues in the Russian armed force as well, and culture has a tendency to doctrine for breakfast, especially when you get involved in

combat operations. On balance, I think we're overestimated, or at least I ever estimated what the Russian military could do and could execute. And so only the extent they could execute the things they could do on a smaller scale, on a larger scale in the context of an invasion of the second large country in Europe. And lastly, the Russian military is deeply theoretical and had developed fairly good operational concepts, had bought the technology. But the biggest thing that was missing was ultimately the software in the military. They were missing the organizational capacity to actually translate theory into practice

and to take those peacetime developed operational concepts that they had employed in Syria and other places, but in a very boutique capacity and in a permissive environment, right, to put another way to anybody listening is in a place where it was very easy and they could control the pace of events and how they employ these capabilities. When they attempted to do this in Ukraine, this fairly quickly came apart. And it took them quite a long time to actually be able to realize some of these concepts, although I will say also to be fair, that at least in the last six to eight months, they seem to improve significantly in things like dynamic targeting,

development of recon, strike, recon, fire, and the things they were talking about that they couldn't do early in the war. And so it's been a mixed story of, on the one hand, degradation of the ability of the force to operate at scale and a real loss of force quality from the casualties taken at the beginning of the war. And on the other hand, demonstrate the ability to adapt and learn over time, deploy new technologies in the force,

evolve the technology that they had, and start getting better at employing the concepts that they couldn't initially execute in the force. So I don't know if I don't if I did that topic, just to your fairly open question. I have a follow up. That's really interesting. I have a follow up. And I want in a minute, I want to get to the overestimation of Ukrainian capabilities, especially in 2023, probably because 2022 went so much better than a lot of people were expecting.

But sticking with 2022 and the beginning, the sort of first, if you divide the war into two is one of the ways you divide it in your chapter. And that initial operation, from what you just said, it sounds, I'm just going to state what you said in sort of a compressed, maybe slightly radical version. Then you tell me if this is, if I've heard you correctly. From what you've just said, it sounds like actually the Russian military as it existed in February of 2022 on the line of departure couldn't have successfully carried out the kind of regime change operation that they were planning to undertake because there were.

things that were just fundamental about the constitution of the Russian military that rendered them incapable of that. It wasn't a sort of a series of bad decisions here and there that had better decisions been made in the weeks leading up to the operation and the execution of the operation itself. Actually, we would have seen a different outcome. It's that based on what you know now, it probably was baked when they crossed the LD. Is that fair? Is that too strong?

Like, just say more if you would. I think it's too strong for two reasons. So first, the reality is that in the early days of the war was quite close. And it was very much incumbent on Ukrainian forces and Ukrainian volunteers to react. And if it wasn't for them, there's a fair chance that the war could have still been lost then. To be fairly frank, Ukraine was not that well prepared to defend. A lot of the political decisions that have been made in the run-up of the war had not put Ukraine, had not positioned Ukraine well to defend against that type of operation.

So it hinged on a couple of battles. And the reason I want to say that is that, you know, there's a tendency when you look back in history to believe that events were overdetermined. But I've spent quite a bit of time, as you know, doing work in Ukraine, conducting interviews and trying to piece together in early history of this conflict. And the more I've learned, the more I figured out how much was actually contingent and how much individual decisions and actions played a role. So I can't, I wouldn't go as far as say that it couldn't have succeeded.

I think it could not have possibly succeeded the way the Russians imagined it to succeed. But that had to do with two big factors. First, they were operating on a series of just wild assumptions that weren't true about Ukraine, right? There was no way that those assumptions were going to interact with reality in the way that would prove favorable to the Russian operation, right? And a second, the way they were employing the force was fundamentally irrational from the standpoint of basic logic of military strategy and concentration, mass, and whatnot. And they were not really attempting to conduct a joint force operation focused on the Ukrainian military. so much as attempting to paralyze Ukrainian decision-making, give the sense that the country was rapidly collapsing

and tried to very rapidly advance into Ukraine on multiple competing fronts in an effort to quickly capture the country and then transition to an occupation phase, right? And so my sense of it is that we didn't get to see how the military itself would perform until really after the first couple of weeks And by that point, it was depleted of much of what was available in it. And they were attempting to employ it at peacetime force strength as well. And the Russian military was a partial mobilization army.

So there's a lot of compounding factors there. But bottom line is, I think looking at the way they conduct this operation, the biggest factor above all was the Russian plan. And the Russian plan was driven by political assumptions, right? And how the force was used. And unfortunately, that tends to be deterministic. I think that as analysts, we always tend to rationalize force employment. So if you're going to ask, what would people like me think before the war? Also, I think that we believe that the Russian leadership would have all these assumptions

and what hand the football over to the general staff, which would organize, you know, a combined arms operation that would recognize that would be a hard fight and then they would have to engage the Ukrainian military. And we rationalized it and we forgot that actually political assumptions very strongly shape the military. military strategy and the military strategy flows from them. And the concept of operations is going to be determined by those assumptions. And even if that doesn't make any sense to us, what Russian leadership was thinking, it certainly made sense to them. In some respects, they threw the better part of their force away in the first couple of weeks. And Ukraine mounted a very violent defense. Although a couple of asteris in there, one, external factors prove

significant. It is Western intelligence and support played a larger role than I think people know. and none of us would really appreciate what the impact would be or what we would even do. So sort of how could you predict the interaction of these forces on top of external factors that you wouldn't even have known about in the run-up tools? And there's a great deal, I think, that we didn't know about the Ukrainian military. So if you're going to ask on the analytical side where the greatest difference was between expectations and what actually transpired, it was probably actually less. not assessment on the Russian forces and more on the assessment of the Ukrainian forces.

You have this really nicely put formula in the chapter that there's a tension between contingency in the role of chance in military operations on the one hand and structural factors on the other, which is kind of a truism, but then you add something that I think is really helpful and thoughtful, which is, and by the way, as time goes on, structural factors matter more. contingency matters more in the moment, the longer the period, the more that structure matters. And that sort of takes us naturally from 2022 to 2023, where because of Russia's failure at the outset, there's a real bullishness about the Ukrainian cause, which, I mean, to be clear, I am a, I'm a supporter of, but then it transitions into a kind of widespread optimism about Ukraine's military prospects.

And I think we saw those, objectively speaking, run into some pretty hard walls in 2023. Talk about that. Talk about, you know, why people thought that the counteroffensive that was matted in 2023 was necessary

and was going to succeed and give us your analysis of what went wrong. I realize I'm skipping several periods ahead. Sure, sure. It gets more complicated here. It's a 45-minute podcast. No, I understand. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, and for those interested in what I think is a fair treatment of the war and periodization of it, you're welcome to check out the chapter. But what I think is that for a part of the challenge is that whenever we're following a war early on, we tend to learn a lot of things that are not true. And we often have a tendency to overcorrect for assumptions or expectations of proven wrong. And that's what happened at the outset of the war. And so there was a tendency to overcorrect to believe that it turns out that a lot of things we thought about the Russian military were wrong.

And that's not the case. Some things we thought were wrong, they always will be about an adversary military because you never know what they can do until you see it in practice and military power is very context dependent. If you see a military in one context, it doesn't mean they're going to perform as well or the same in a different context against a different opponent. I'm sorry, war is now a sporting event with a regulation pitch that everyone gets to play on

and you can see them from game to game. It's just not how it works. I mean, I think there was a tendency to correction where Ukraine military did far better than we expected. But then I think there was a degree of success in terms of, in terms of Ukrainian strategic communication is shaping in wealth. And in shifting our mindset, to some extent properly as to what they could do, but also I think to an exaggerated, exaggerated perception of what the Ukrainian forces could do

with our equipment, with a very short or, let's say, compressed training timeline in an offensive operation against a prepared defense. And if I was going to summarize, first, why the offensive was necessary. Well, I mean, politically Ukraine pegged success in this war to liberation of occupied territory. So it had to conduct offensive operations. There's no other way to do it, right? That's problem one.

Problem two is that Ukrainian political leadership consistently felt the need to conduct offenses in order to maintain external support. And because Ukraine's military effort was heavily dependent on external material assistance, right? And the other parties involved were de facto material parties to the war. it created a great deal of internal pressure and gave a sense that every couple of months, they had to retake the initiative along the front line. And more importantly, it created the sense that they didn't have a lot of time.

Because the question isn't to me why Ukraine conducted the offensive. It's why Ukraine felt the urgency to conduct an offensive as soon as possible in 2023. And the initial conversation was to do it in the spring. And it started happening in practice of began late spring early summer. right and now was kind of the sense of the need for impetus otherwise Ukraine will disappear from the front page you know it'll be like the Afghanistan effect

if you remember that war where Afghanistan started showing up on pages 20 plus in the paper I remember well yep that those of us who those of us who remember those wars remember how remember how war could could get forgotten over time if there's as much happening

and you know the way the war is covered does create pressure because if you look at typical coverage it's either gloom and doom or sort of we're back. And if there's not much happening, news deaths immediately begin to declare it's a stalemate. So this is, I think, the driver to some extent. And then assumptions going in. So if I was to summarize them, I would say first there was a degree of unrealistic assessment

or a sort of insufficient value assigned to a prepared defense and how difficult is to overcome prepared defense historically. and military history of conventional war, especially contemporary war, shows how challenging it is to do this and what the pieces you need to try to put together to attain the decisive advantage, that you would, you know, to attain a degree of decisive advantage to overcome this kind of defense. Second, there was a failure to appreciate that the conditions which enabled successful offenses by Ukraine in the fall were almost completely the opposite in the spring, right, that all the problems on the Russian side, deaths of the forces, insufficiently prepared lines,

structural manpower problems, et cetera, et cetera. This was, the situation was significantly reversed, both mobilization and entrenchment and a construction of multiple layered lines of defense. And Russia had a very high density of forces that had basically been arrested for many months. Next, I would say that one of the things that I think folks learn, or at least started talking about as being incredibly important again,

is intangible, things like morale and motivation. And this is always an important part of the conversation. War is not just about counting tanks and equipment and all that. But I have to tell you, intangibles are very hard to assess. They vary for one part of the front to another. They change depending on how the war is going. They're not a constant. And it's pretty hard to rigorously assess them on both sides.

And they can often be used to fuel magical thinking or degree of hand-waving when you're faced with a significant challenge. and the way you overcome it is by writing in to the planning that the other side has low morale and they're going to break when the initial breaching effort or initial assault hits their line. And you can do that, to be frank, I'm a bit critical of it because on the one hand, we tend not to account for intangibles enough. But on the other hand, if you remember some of the criticism of thinking in the run-up to World War I and what became kind of colloquially nicknamed the cult of the offensive, the belief that,

oh, if you just have the will, you can overcome these things. Work consistently shows that's not true. Actually, a lot of it comes down to fire superiority, having the proper enablers, being able to inflict shock and suppression, substantially degrading your opponent before conducting the assault, all these things. They're not nearly as exciting. It's just assuming that a successful combined arms maneuver is going to break the opponent's will. But most of the time, that doesn't happen.

actually, you need to achieve these things in order to have success. So the last part I'll add to the year is that I think the offensive was very much a conventionally planned offensive from the maneuverer's school of thought. And there you can definitely see strong Western influences from the U.S. and U.K. because Ukraine is not a military that is based around combined arms maneuver. It is a military that struggles to scale force employment above the company level. is a military that is driven fundamentally by fires and is more oriented towards attritional and positional warfare than maneuver. And while it has a lot of bright spots, there's a lot of things that are great about the Ukrainian military, this offensive seemed to be better planned

or written for Western force that we've had a lot more time to prepare and train, that we've had much more significant support, greater advantages and enablers and all that. And so I think, I think analysts looking at the offensive in the run-up to it were a bit pessimistic but sort of cautious in their discussion of what could take place. And the last point I make is that in terms of military strategy, the way the offensive was actually conducted, Ukraine selected the axis of advance that was the most difficult and the most risky, but also had the highest potential payoff. And unfortunately, I think it was by far the most expected access of advance, which led

to a set piece battle where the side that was defending was fully prepared for the advance and knew about the plans well ahead of execution. And you end up having a set piece match. And on top of all these challenges, land warfare strongly tends to favor the defense. And that's not a new finding. Yeah. Well, let me, so on that sort of 80,000 foot plane, let me ask my next question. And I want to get to the present day in what you think that Ukraine ought to do and what you

think, you know, America ought to do as we think about the future. this war but before we get there just some more theoretical what is the future of maneuver given what we are seeing and learning on the battlefield in ukraine where you have two sensor strike complexes facing each other you have a you know a role played by fires that's quite dominant you've seen several maneuver gambits fail are we are we back this is very blunt and kind of crude but are we Are we in a situation like we were, you know, in the First World War where there are these new technologies in those days, say machine guns today, you know, unmanned vehicles, you know, the sensor strike complex and everything that entails that we just haven't figured out,

you know, there's sort of post-machine gun pre-Blitz Creek, like we haven't figured out the combination of tactics, techniques, procedures, technologies, what have you, that are going to allow maneuver to thrive again. And we're in this period where we can expect attrition and positional warfare to be dominant? Like, how do you think about this? Yeah. So I think about this along kind of two planks. The first is to be maneuver warfare is really an initial period of war game. I mean, prolonged conventional wars between nature powers have extended the traditional phases. They do come down to reconstitution, replacement of the better parts of your force that you've lost, defense industrial mobilization. And so maneuver warfare is a

conversation typically had, you know, amongst peacetime militaries with great peacetime concepts. that are heavily dependent upon advanced technology and fairly complex or sophisticated levels of integration, sort of seamless and getting all the stuff to operate together. But it's not, it's something that won't solve for the prolonged periods of tradition that you will end up in a long war. And so to me, I think you have to plan for both wars,

the initial period of war and the long war, and that's what this war shows. The second way I think about is that I don't think maneuver warfare is dead. I don't think it ever will be, but it's going to need a lot of help. It needs to be earned. And the way you have to earn on the battlefield, right, is you have to be able to attain significant advantage in fires.

You have to have the ability to substantially degrade your opponent. I'll be clear about my biases. I don't believe in the cognitive effects of maneuver warfare. I think that aspects of maneuver warfare theory in the West is just voodoo magic. But I want to go down this rabbit hole because it's usually interesting to Army majors and nobody else. So I'll just stop right there. We have a lot of Army

majors. We take all kinds on school four. I will say briefly, since we're on the subject, I got out of the Marine Corps as a captain because being a major seemed to me to be the least happy possible existence on Earth. Lieutenant Colonel looked okay. Captain was a lot of fun.

Major, I could definitely leave it. So anyway, sorry, please continue. And no offense meant to any majors listening this that are writing their next doctrinal thesis. Okay, but this particular war, would it does show us a couple of interesting things. First, you have to deal with a cheap, persistent high fidelity ISR, which is when it comes to many warfare, it's very hard to achieve surprise and it's very hard to concentrate. This war shows that both sides have had to substantially disperse both on the offense and the defense. And you see this increasing tendency of terrain being

held by much smaller unit sizes. This will be. this was a trend already observed long before this war, but this war is a really interesting case of a large-scale conventional war with relatively high density of forces, where very few units are electing to hold terrain because of the persistence of means of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance of why it's so difficult to mask either in the office or the defense, this is issue one. Second issue is it shows that denial of maneuver is much easier than what it takes to actually make it effective because you have the proliferation of fairly cheap means of precision strike,

of non-line-of-sight precision strike too, right? From anti-tanked missiles to drones of various types and what have you, and you increasingly have forces that have munitions of such abundance that essentially they're just using strike drones against individual personnel on the infantry map, right? You know, there's also a big problem that folks that are heavily into maneuver warfare are often not willing to discuss the significant deficit of enablers. For example, let's take prepared defense, mind breaching technology, what have you.

The Ukraine offensive ran into significant challenges and stopped early on, not because of modern technologies that are particularly distinct to this battlefield. Okay. It was traditional mines, anti-tank dishes, well-covered cemented in trenches, layers of defenses, a force that was backed by artillery, a force that was backed by attack helicopters so that any columns or leakers that would break through could be picked up by rotary aviation. And it wasn't until actually much later, more like three months into the offensive. Long after it became clear that it was going to achieve a breakthrough, the things like first person viewed drones came to dominate the battlefield and deny maneuver in daytime, right?

And I just want to lay out this history clear. I was there in July myself during the middle of this thing, right, in the south. So to me, it's sort of, it's sort of still clear as day. And and so the problems were the same problems, any force were the faced 50 years ago, attempting a maneuver operation, a breaching effort against the well-prepared defense, right, without having established these advantages, without having the enablers that then would answer and neutralize the advantages of the other side. And I will add, to be clear, lots of folks who are looking at this will say, hey, we can mass, we can do as things on large scale.

Actually, the work shows that the combination of traditional capabilities, along with these more innovative and novel ones, make it such that both sides choose not to mass when they can't because they want to avoid those losses and they don't see massing forces giving them an advantage. So because you can't math, it doesn't mean that you would choose to. and don't believe that the other people, that both sides engaged in this war, it hasn't occurred to them that they could just mass. Like, these are both militaries that have enough experience

fighting each other the last two years, that many of the things that occur to observers have occurred to them, too. And also the other alibi, which is, well, we have air power, we'll achieve air superiority. And what I say that is, okay, that's an important factor, but you should not take achieving air superiority and maintaining it for granted. That's part one.

Part two is many Western militaries don't have the, to sustain a prolonged conventional war, even if they had air superiority all day, every day. Actually, most of them would be out of munitions within a week or a couple of weeks. So that's worth noting. And the third point is, air superiority is not talismatic. There's a lot of things that you would not have an answer to in this war, just by virtue of having air superiority. I'm just sorry. Most of the drones being employed within, you know, a thousand feet or a couple hundred feet of the battlefield,

you wouldn't have an easy answer to to the air superiority. Many of the challenges posed by classical traditional forms of defense, you wouldn't quite have an answer to the air security either. So I'd be cautious in over-investing in just that as sort of our typical way, our typical way of not wanting to learn the right lessons. Feel free to challenge the premise of this question, but if at the heart of what makes the defense so potent in this war, in what allows, you know, historically, relatively, you know, small numbers of personnel to hold relatively large areas of terrain is the technology, is the integration of sensors and reconnaissance capacity to strike.

What role does electronic warfare and then cyber, well, what role is it playing right now in terms of serving as a countermeasure to such a complex in either direction? And what role, I mean, my mind goes to it as sort of thinking about the problem. You know, you have that air superiority as one sort of alibi. You know, another another alibi I'm sort of generating in real time as I ask this question is, what if I can cyber and electronic warfare my way out of this conundrum? I can almost do a kind of suppression of this sensor strike complex through tools in those domains that contribute and allow me to push forward. How do you respond to that?

Okay, so on cyber, I have a bit dim view of cyber and conventional warfare. I think it was relevant in the opening this war and a couple other moments where Russia conducted fairly targeted cyber attacks. But in general, conventional war, I tend to see cyber as more of a sideshow because, or as a component of intelligence operations more so than anything else, because in most case, for the effects you're trying to achieve, you're much better off either with with electronic warfare being employed for defense, which I'll get up to in a second. And for most of the offensive effects you're trying to achieve, to be perfectly honest,

you're just much better off putting a missile into something than trying to cyber. All right. So that's, and you can say that there's a knuckle-dragger's view of it, but you don't see either sides being particularly effective with offensive cyber warfare in this war, and they're not staying up at night talking about that. They're staying up at night talking about air and missile defense, missile defense, missile production rates, air defense intercept rates, so on, so on, so forth, and sort of all the fundamentals.

And there's a reason for that because I think cyber is terrifyingly overhyped and was never going to live up to the expectations of it in the conventional war. I don't want to dismiss it out of hand either. I think it can achieve effects in certain cases and obviously critical and supportive intelligence operations. But I just don't see us playing as significant role in conventional wars people thought were expected and assumed. And also, it's interesting how how militaries and countries prove quite resilient to it. And the reversible effects of cyber are such that the advantage is going to be. going to give you probably will be not that significant. Well, big picture. On autotronic warfare, this is one area where we did not overestimate the Russian military. I won't be very clear. This is

actually proven incredibly important from the very beginning of the war as only grown importance as both sides have gotten very good effective employing electronic warfare. It emerged as a natural counter to proliferation of uncrued systems. It is used extensively in support of fires as an alternative way of finding, you know, and fixing a target. It is used extensively across the battlefield. It also was a factor, by the way, that resulted in weaker Russian performance early on because of extensive EW fractricide and the fact that large-scale conventional war is not like it is in training.

And the weapons and capabilities that use the training that work then in a permissive environment, in a contested environment where your own force is doing half of, is sort of doing half or more than half of the EW effects against your capabilities. I'm sorry, I'm just now remembering all the challenges Russians had early on. It can have fairly significant detrimental effect. Today, I see that the contest on crew systems, E&W continues to evolve and continues to advance in a qualitative dimension. EW proliferated and became small across the front,

down to the point of any infantrymen have. having a train sheet W unit, any person being able to carry a jammer module or a frequency detector module that lets them know drones are coming. Drones are evolving with it, starting to get home on jam systems, AI enable terminal guidance when they've reached the target so that even when the command signal is broken, the drone can then auto target and fly itself to hit a vehicle. So this continues to be, you know, a closely watched match and a moving target from my point of view. I think that both are effective answers to each other. The challenge you always have, and this is the best way I think to look at this war. First, understand context.

Like, defense analysts tend to want to view things in isolation, but you have to understand context. The context of this war is that you have two forces that cannot effectively scale the employment, right, of their combat potential in which you basically have is you have a lot of equipment, a lot of manpower, but a very small thin slice of the force fighting in any given time, typically a platoon company level.

Second, you have positional fighting that's highly routinized, right? Where most of the attacks are being done across the same terrain, both sides are well dug in. They know where to expect each other. They know each other's habits and patterns. So if you have routinized warfare over the same terrain. Third, you have such a small scale in terms of offensive, defensive operations that essentially a company commander who is courting an assault by several assault detachment that day in each detachment somewhere between 11 and 16 men has division level plus assets

supporting him looking at the same fight and division level assets opposing him, looking at the exact same fight. And the only thing they're looking is the action that day, which is his action, which I've seen a number of folks in military discussions admire. and I basically say that's a negative adaptation. You're admiring the crush without looking at the problem. The problem is neither side can scale force employment because they lost quality and can't replace it.

The problem is that both sides lost too much junior leadership and can't replace these officers and can't coordinate complex operation. The problem is that they can't attain the relevant fire superiority and they can't figure out how to overcome a prepared defense so they're employing force in very small packets. That's the problem. The good news isn't that, you know, division level fires assets are available to somebody at the junior level because everybody's been sitting in the same place for the last year, dug in.

All right. And that is also the context in which drones and various things have proven particularly effective, but they are additive to traditional conventional systems and they are offset to some extent for traditional fires, but they're not a substitute for them. And for those who have these discussions, what I also say is keep in mind this. Both kind of revolutionaries and traditionals have a point in commenting on technological innovation and changes or perceived change to the character of war. Revolutionaries tend to look at the potential of technology

and see that it is not necessarily yet mature and try to extrapolate where it could go. That is a useful point of view. Air power when it was first introduced in World War I, wasn't that big of a deal, but you've been wrong to dismiss it, even though it wasn't that relevant in the context of World War I, given the implications of air power for the evolution of modern warfare.

It's worth that of point of view. On the other hand, many revolutions are declared and very few arrive in practice, right? Traditionalists also have a fair point of view, and I tend to cite more traditional than not. I'm more of a conservative analyst kind of in my outlook, that futurists and revolutionaries often assess technology when it's first introduced before it has driven cycles of adaptation and the development of counters, and they often assess it without giving due credit to the context in which that technology emerged.

We can have a system that was very, very significant in one war, be almost completely irrelevant to another one. You know, the TB2-Byrgyzart drone was decisive for Azerbaijan over Armenian 2020 in the Gornikarabakh War and was really relevant in maybe the first week and a half of this war and not heard of for very long after that. Okay. So just gives you just give you an example. One technology was very significant and one more versus another. Final question for you.

It's another big one. So take it, take it at whatever, whatever length of response you want to offer up. So we had your co-contributor to war on Ukraine, Stephen Cockton on, a really fascinating conversation. As you would expect. And he had, you know, a sort of interesting proposal for how to proceed for Ukraine and for, you know, its Western backers, which didn't really have much to do with the battlefield. His view was, it's going to have to be some kind of armistice. There is no, there is no full liberation. of every captured inch of Ukraine. The question then becomes, how do you, how do you put yourself in a place to negotiate that conclusion in a way that's most favorable to Ukrainian and an American interest and least favorable to Russian interests?

And his answer to that question was essentially political warfare. You have to apply pressure to the Russian regime and you have to make Putin feel insecure in his seat. And that will give you the leverage you need to push that kind of resolution in his favorable direction as possible under the circumstances. It's not going to be something to celebrate, but you could potentially get something that's that's not essentially negotiating Ukraine's defeat. What is your view on the road ahead for Ukraine? What is what is the approach that they should adopt to achieve the most favorable outcome they can in your view? Yeah, not an easy question.

I know Steve's views. I've heard him say that before. I think it's, I think it's interesting. I would beg to respectfully differ because I don't understand the mechanism by which one would achieve that in Russia. And few people are as knowledgeable on personal to authoritarian regimes like Steve. And I wonder if Steve would not be even better

at debating that viewpoint with Steve because he knows more than most that personal and authoritarian regimes are incredibly good at coupproofing themselves. and eliminating viable alternatives. And so this is not only very difficult to achieve, but even harder to predict. That is, it's going to be incredibly difficult to predict the regime changes on personal and authoritarian system.

Lastly, you should be careful what you wish for, right? Because Germans, for example, worked very hard to get Lenin reintroduced back into imperial Russia and the hope that revolution would take Russia out of the war. And they were successful in that endeavor. But going back to continuously in history, while nobody early on expected the Bolsheviks to win, they certainly weren't the biggest factor in the first revolution. And the second one that takes place,

unexpectedly, the Bolsheviks end up winning in the Russian Civil War and establishing the Soviet Union. I don't think that down the line that's really paid off dividends for Germany. But this is sort of saying and continuously, like, be cautious, although I'm person of the mind that would be far better off of the same. somebody other than Putin and not at all concerned or afraid of regime change. I'm just saying you have to be a bit wary of it. My own view is, look, the military strategy in this war, as far as I've understood it, had been based on achieving war termination on favorable terms for Ukraine.

And the point of military operations was to try to generate the leverage necessary to attain that. While the officially stated political goals are to liberate all of Ukrainian territory, How Ukraine achieves that is a different and a much more nuanced discussion, right? I think it was always understood by most folks, perhaps other than the most extreme optimist, that Ukraine was unlikely to have the military capacity to liberate all this territory by force. And this was very clear, if you look at the planning behind the 2023 offensive, right, the overriding principle was the thesis behind it or the theory of success, that if Ukrainian forces could successfully break through Russian defense in the South, they could then hold Crimea at risk,

make the Russian position Crimea untenable under the assumption that Russian leadership valid Crimea more politically than other parts of Ukraine that they'd occupied, and use that as leverage to then attain an agreement, liberate the rest, so to speak. Now, look, this is a bit broad brushing it, but any theory of success has to have some assumptions behind it. And at least it was reasonable at that time to assume, given the military capability that Ukraine had, you know, that something like this could be done. I think overall, the vision hasn't changed, right? The challenge is that it doesn't look like Ukraine will be able to conduct another major offensive any time soon, certainly not in the near future. I think in the interim, the best way forward is this year, stabilize the front, hold Russia to incremental gains.

First, Russian leadership needs to be convinced that they can no longer attain their political objectives, which are also tied to territory, to the conduct of military operations. Until you've achieved this most basic condition, you're not in a good position to negotiate anything. Because your opponent always has a better alternative to negotiate agreement, which is they think they're going to win. or they think they're going to gain more, as long as they think that, good luck at the negotiating table, right? This is a problem one. So this is the current priority.

Simultaneously, Ukraine has to rebuild its military and rebuild its combat potential, dug itself in a pretty deep manpower hole and that's going to take the better part of a year to stabilize, right, and sort of reconstitute the force. This is a persistent challenge for any military in year two, year three of war. The Ukrainian armed forces will have to have some kind of potential to conduct offensive operations down the line. I'm not saying attempt another major offensive.

I'm saying at least have the prospect of holding Russian positions in Ukraine a threat so that Russian leadership senses that once they cannot make any further progress, there is the risk of losing what they've already taken. The third part, and you've seen this in action over the last several months, is Ukraine has to demonstrate that it can inflict sufficient pain upon Russia striking Russian critical infrastructure, the way Russia has been doing to Ukraine for the last two years, so that the cost of the war rise. And so the Russian leadership doesn't believe that even if there's no progress at the front, they can simply break Ukraine over time by destroying Ukrainian critical infrastructure, right, and that the long war still favors

them, and that this is essentially a cost-free strategy. Because if there are no cost to you, if nobody's striking your critical infrastructure, destroying things you value, it is kind of cost Bombard administration. So this is essentially the third part of it, but most of it's oriented towards setting the condition, right? And if the framing of war termination on favorable terms sounds too rosy now, and in many respects that I think that's a fair assessment, you should keep in mind that it's no less important to de Verlis think of how to achieve war termination on terms that are not unfavorable that don't compromise Ukrainian sovereignty, even if Ukraine cannot retake this territory. And also that how this war ends, there's a fair chance will lead to

another war, continuation war. That's what this war is. This is the continuation war of the original 2014 conflict. And that Ukraine's objective in the conduct of combat operations isn't just to achieve war termination with Russia. It is to get security commitments, not guarantees, but at the verily security commitments from United States and other countries, which has gotten quite a few of it's about the sign a bilateral agreement with the United States this week. And to get the sort of long-term commitment that will ensure that anything that Ukraine ultimately agrees to is not simply a rearment period for Russia where Ukraine is left in the lurch, but that Western countries will actually invest in Ukrainian forces long term.

So Ukraine is not signing up for a Russian rearment period and then a defeat in the third war, which is a consistent worry you always hear in Ukraine. Because wars like this go on for a long time, and often leaders feel like they get stuck. They don't have a clear way forward, like a theory of victory. They don't have a way out either because nothing they'll sign with the opponent they think will be worth the paper it's on. And they're unwilling to commit domestic political suicide by making concessions that the public won't agree to. And Ukrainian public won't agree to major concessions, formal concessions to Russia either. Michael Kaufman, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

contributed to war in Ukraine, conflict strategy, and the return of a. fractured world host of Russia contingency. Thank you for the really, really interesting conversation. Thanks for having a podcast. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.