School of War - Ep 86: David Betz on Ukraine’s Counteroffensive and Russia’s Defense

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London, joins the show to talk about what the status of the Ukrainian counteroffensive has to teach us about the enduring relevance of fortifications and the defense as a form of war. ▪️ Times      •    02:02 Introduction      •    02:16 Modern War     •    03:36 Counteroffensive progress     •    06:08 Tracking events     •   11:08 Russia’s defensive scheme     •    23:07 Fortified strategic complex     •    32:9 Maginot reconsidered      •    40:47 The pendulum      •   48:07 What if…  To read the article discussed on this episode click the link - Russian fortifications present an old problem for Ukraine - JULY 20, 2023 DAVID J BETZ Follow along on Instagram

Let's start with a commonplace observation. The increasing pace of technological innovation has changed, even revolutionized, virtually every walk of human life, the practice of war, very much included. I'm going to go out in a limb and say that for several generations now, arguably since the German invasions of Poland and France, the better part of a century ago, the progress of technology and warfare has been on the side of the offensive and of maneuver, that the speed and coordination, that motorization, aviation, communications, technology, sensors,

precision targeting, basically everything that has changed the face at the battlefield as we know it, has contributed to the impression that the static world of fortifications and set positional defense that so dominated the history of warfare up until the middle of the 1900s

is utterly obsolete. But if that's the case, how are some very old-fashioned seeming positional defensive arrangements maintained by Russia on Ukrainian soil holding up the summer's counter-of-eastern, offensive. Let's discuss. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii.

December 7, 1941, 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. 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, photos, and more School of War content, follow along on Instagram at School of War.

Just tap the link in the show notes and subscribe. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Professor David Betz. He is Professor of War in the Modern World at King's College, London. He is the author of numerous articles and publications, including recently a fascinating essay in Engelsberg ideas called Russian fortifications present an old problem. for Ukraine. David, thank you so much for joining the show.

Thanks very much. Thanks for the invitation. Before we get to your article and the situation in Ukraine, just talk a bit for a second, if you would, about how looking at Ukraine fits into your broader area of focus. What is it that you work on when you say that you work on modern war? Well, it's actually not all that complicated. I tend to be work on issues of contemporary contemporary warfare, and so that, you know, my eye tends to be on wherever the war is at any given point of time. The main thread of my research, my work over, well, most of my career, has been on the intersection of technology and war. And so I do tend to touch, not just on

strategy, but dip down occasionally into operations and tactics and the like. And so, you know, my recent interest in Ukraine essentially stems from it very simply being a current instance of major interstate war. And so like many others in the community, that's the essence of the interest in it. I would add, though, that I started off as a Soviet military analyst. I'm just old enough to have begun my academic career at the tail end of the Soviet Union. And so I've had a longstanding interest in the region, in Russia, in Ukraine particularly. Well, let me ask you a very broad question. We're recording here on Thursday, August the 17th.

What is your general assessment of how the Ukrainian counteroffensive is going? My general assessment is that it's gone poorly for the Ukrainians. It's, well, we're well over two months now into the counteroffensive. and it's made essentially negatory gains, you know, a handful of villages in the crumple zone of the Russian fortified strategic complex in South Ukraine. And it's been enormously costly. The casualties are in the tens of thousands. And while there have been a few games, they've been very, very small. and balanced in fact by some Russian gains in other sectors of the front.

So in general terms, no, it's not at all satisfactory or even close to adequate from the Ukrainian perspective. They've come nowhere close to what to achieving what presumably was the goal of the offensive to cut, you know, to cut off, probably to cut off Russian land access. through South Ukraine to Crimea, they're 100 kilometers away, over 100 kilometers away from achieving that. They're really sort of on the edge, perhaps, of the first belt of major defenses. So generally speaking, I think the results have been very disappointing from that Ukrainian perspective, very worrisome, no doubt to NATO as time runs down and as Ukrainian

manpower and equipment is degraded. And I think that the Russians are probably feeling considerably more confident than they were six months ago. Can I ask without revealing too much in the way of trade secrets, how it is that you track Ukrainian progress? Because I find following the war, they're not with quite the level of attention that I think you do, it's easy for me to find and read and profit from pretty high quality reporting and analysis on Russian dispositions. But the same places that are doing that high-quality analysis, for defensible and understandable reasons, don't provide the same level of analysis of their view or don't publicize their views of Ukrainian dispositions, intent, and so forth.

How is it that you're tracking actually what's going on? I find it quite difficult to find out what's going on from the Ukrainian perspective. Yeah. Well, I'll say up front that I doubt that I'm, you know, I'm working. There's no trade secret. I'm, you know, aside from aforementioned distant connection to people on the ground who lend, you know, people in the country who lend a certain perspective, although, you know, very rather narrow in particular, I'm looking at the same things that that you might be looking at. That is to say, open source, open source material. I do, I would say that this is a war that's been intensely reported. very, very visual. It's the most highly filmed conflict. I think that there's, there's,

there's ever been. You know, we've had many examples of that recently. So there's, there's no end of imagery to, to view. You could spend the rest of your life, I think, looking at combat reels. It's, but the problem is what you, how you interpret those things, how you put them into context. And that is, that is, that is, that is, enormously complicated by the fact that both sides are, you know, actively manipulating the information space. Central part of, you know, I think practically everyone agree that managing the perception of conflict is now part and parcel. It's central to the conduct of modern work. Both sides are doing that. So you have to, so in short, I'm looking at the same things that that anybody else might do.

I bring to it a bit more baggage than most, maybe having spent a good number of years thinking about the area and working out how, thinking about how war works, but it's still fundamentally the same data. I have, though, I do recommend to my own students that they switch off the mainstream, they simply switch off the mainstream media, which has been, by and large, dismal and largely a waste of time,

which is astonishing, frankly, but that is where we are. You have to be intensely skeptical. The most useful thing to my mind that I'm reading the same things as most people are trying to be skeptical about it. You try to do diligence on what you see. You try to be cautious about what is being said by whom you apply elementary principles of quibono and so on. And ideally, you reserve judgment. There's a lot of things we simply don't know.

And a lot of things presented as things which are known, which are really more in the nature of hope, rumor. And so we need to guard against those. One thing that I am happy that I did do and have done consistently from the beginning was I followed the Ukrainian – I followed four telegram channels daily throughout the throughout the conflict. Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the Russian Ministry of Defense, the most partisan Ukrainian telegram channel and the most partisan Russian telegram channel. Very often on those things, you're looking at the same picture.

the same stories, but you get somewhat different perspective and looking at them over time, or in the moment you can draw some tentative conclusions about how those things contrast, what each side is saying, and over time you can draw some conclusions about the techniques of information control that they're employing and their relative degrees of veracity. But that's about it. So look, sorry, a bit of a long answer there, but there's honestly no trade secret. No, no, I take your point. And on your point about the media, I woke up this morning. I think the latest news is there's a particular village that's been captured. And, you know, I say this is a, I gather like you, a supporter of the Ukrainian cause

is somebody who's hostile to the Russian invasion. I suppose I'm happy that this village was captured, but on the other hand, when you consider the scale of the war, the size of the front, the idea that the good news of the day is a village was captured is itself quite bad news, right? And you have that, I mean, I find myself kind of constantly processing the information through that lens. Yeah. You talked, you used a couple of phrases as we spoke, and you talked about crumple zone, you talked about a defensive complex.

We just start to get into here, into what your article is about. Talk about the Russian defensive scheme, if you would. How have the Russians planned to hold terrain in Ukraine and are they executing on their plan? Okay, great. Yeah. So I think the first thing to observe about the Russian fortifications is their field fortifications is the scale of them, which is gigantic. So this is you're talking of something over 1,500 kilometers of contact, not all of which is being fought over. but even if you look at just the southern portion that is being actively fought over through much of it,

much of its lengths fought over or threatened hundreds of kilometers in length. And that is most of all of that which is located in in the formerly Ukrainian control there is, now under Russian control, has been built in the last, effectively in the last, well, mostly in the last half year, actually. And so the sheer length is noteworthy. The second is the depth. The depth varies from place to place, but in the most threatened sectors, particularly in the south, again, where most of the fighting is now occurring, the depth of the fortified complex is in the tens of kilometers. and it consists of, they're often called wines or belts. They tend, they're actually not completely continuous.

They are linear. They're, while not completely continuous, they are pretty close to continuous. There's a mix of getting down to the details of the confirmation of the defensive arrangements themselves. There tend to be a mix of, or tend to be, they are a mix of different sorts of obstacles. The ones that catch the eye, because they're the most readily observable, are things like the anti-tank ditch, which tends to be, which is usually the forward facing, or sorry, the first element of the physical defenses. There are sensors and outposts and the like and, and

potentially other somewhat defended points that might be ahead of the anti-tank line, but the anti-tank line is really the beginning of the defensive confirmation proper. And that's very observantly. You can see it from a satellite. You can see it from a commercial satellite. It's very obvious because it's a big, long ditch line in the ground with a berm thrown out. So very visible. Usually, ideally, in doctrine, the anti-tank ditch is.

supposed to zigzag through the terrain. In this case, to look at the current Russian fortifications, it doesn't tend to zigzag. It seems to be in a lot of places just simply a straight wine, and that's perhaps they, that's because they had to dig it more hastily, or perhaps also, I think that reflects the possibility that they no longer think that they have to actively man the anti-tank. ditch. So it tends to have a zigzag in it in the past because at each corner of the zig, you would have a small detachment to not really to actively defend it, but more to to watch and to give alarm in case of attack. So they might have decided that in this day and age with much more ubiquitous overhead surveillance provided by UAVs, commercial drones or or their own

more sophisticated military drones like Orlan and the like, that they don't need, don't need that. So first line is your anti-tank ditch. Then you have another linear barrier, which again is an anti-vehicle barrier, which is what people call the dragon's teeth. The dragon's teeth is simply a complex of cement obstacles. Ideally, these cement obstacles are wired together that give them so that they make them easier, harder, harder rather, to push aside. It's not clear. It's not clear the extent or how effectively the Russians have done that. We can observe, though, that there are many hundreds of kilometers of dragon's teeth barriers. Those are, those are, those barriers are pretty difficult,

are pretty significant obstacle for non-tracked, like vehicles, but can be pushed aside, you know, might be pushed aside by a heavy main battle tank, or particularly a main battle tank that is equipped with a plow or other devices to break through. But the point is that with the dragon's teeth is it's just another obstacle to slow and to channel one's opponent. It's behind the dragon's teeth that you then get what are the more actively manned fighting outposts or or strong points. Now, which aside from, unlike the anti-tank ditch and dragon's teeth, which are very observable and hard to hide, the strong points are very irregular in their shape. The Russians use continuous trench lines, so rather than foxholes that are sort of small fighting

positions, they tend to have continuous trench complexes, which give the ability for troops to move from one strong point or from one part of the strong point to another with a degree of protection. But to the maximum extent possible, those strong points are very irregular in their shape. It depends on the terrain that they're trying to defend. and the confirmation of the ground that they're trying to dominate with fire. And ideally, they're camouflaged as much as possible. And it's actually turned out to be quite tricky to do throughout much of the Ukrainian landscape because of the relative openness of the terrain.

A lot of it is agricultural land, and it is generally speaking pretty flat. And so there are lots of examples you can find where you can quite clearly see these manned strong points of weather of varying sizes. But ideally, they are concealed as much as possible. So in the case of Ukraine, a lot of the fighting in the in the in the countryside has the close quarters fighting is taking place in tree lines in the little bit of forested, forested areas in between fields and the like, where it is possible to hide these entrenchments. Anyway, it's all the art of possible. It is not always possible to hide those entrenchments. So that would make, those three things together, then, of course, are also, there are, in this case, belts of minds, thick belts of minds.

Normally, and those might, those can be in front of the anti-tank barrier, in the anti-tank barrier, behind the anti-tank barrier, probably possibly interspersed in the dragon's teeth themselves. It depends, you know, it depends on your appreciation of what is the likely place that your enemy is going to attack and how many mines you have available, and what the ground is like. It turns out that, it turns out that, perhaps not surprisingly, or surprised the sun, that Russia has a lot of mines, just a colossal number of anti-tank mines, and it has the wherewithal, it has the wherewithal to deploy these effectively. All of that, which I've just described, you know, is effectively, you know, aside from the anti-tank instrument, That's 100 years old that these sorts of, you know, that sort of arrangement would not have mystified Joukov or even First World War Generals, let alone Second World War General. A contemporary development that is of note, however, is the more recent, but still decades-old capacity of renewing minefields at a distance through air or artillery delivered means.

So as the attacker degrades your minefield through mind clearance or simply through, you know, battering their way through it, you can rejuvenate the defense in an active way by creating, by essentially deploying mines air, airily, either behind the main offensive so that the breaching force is now separated from its sources of reinforcement and potential avenues of, of retreat, or you can reinforce areas that you may have mined relatively lightly, not knowing exactly where the main blow would come to be able to reinforce it very, very much quickly. So those are the basic elements of a belt, and then you will repeat those belts. In the case of the, in South Ukraine now, where the fighting is going on, they're, generally speaking, agreed to be three main belts. Depending how you count them, you might add another belt.

So those are disposed over tens of kilometers in depth. By the time you hit the third belt, you will have, if you were to hit the third belt, you would have to have penetrated probably 25, 20 to 25 to 30 kilometers in depth. Now, you asked about the crumple zone. And what I're referring to as the crumple zone is the area that is before the main fortified section. And that's an area which, where you are, you're observing, you have the capability to observe enemy movement or, you know, preparation to attack and its movement to, to contact. and the ability to direct fire towards it. It is on the defender's side of the line of contact, to put it that way,

but it is before their main defensive line. And most of the fighting, till over the last two months, has taken place in that area before the first line of main defences, which is to my point earlier, why in general, I would say that the results of the offensive so far are disappointing because they haven't, not only haven't they breached,

they haven't really begun in earnest the efforts to breach the first of what are multiple lines of defense. So that's a really clear and extremely helpful description of, you know, as it were the machine, the defensive machine. Can you say a bit about how the machine is designed to work, how it's designed to kill, which is to say, you know, you speak of these mines. Are the Russians attempting to kill Ukrainians primarily with mines? Are the minds meant to delay and to fix?

And then it's really the fires that are doing the killing. Like, just talk about how it works. Right. So the main thing to understand, I think, about any given fortification, but this is the current, what we're currently talking about is, is a terrific example, is that you have to, you have to look at it not as a, as a, as simply a physical barrier, right? The point of the fort is not simply that, you know, it's some big heavy thing or it's a big, heavy block that is hard to batter down or batter through or climb over or dig under.

It's more than that. What it is, is that there's why I like to use the term fortified strategic complex. because it works in combination, right? It's a complex of elements that are operating in concert to produce a set of tactical dilemmas for the attacking, for the attacker. And that comes from different elements of the fortification, the obstacles. All of that I was just describing, whether it's the anti-tank ditch, the dragon's teeth, mines, or ditches, the trenches, the trenches, the trenches, but specifically, particularly the anti-tank ditches and dragon's teeth, those are designed to channel, canalize enemy movement and to slow that movement so that defensive fires can be applied

against it in the most efficacious way. Also, and you want to have a range of, you want to have a range of weapons types that are interacting. So, you know, a minefield, you know, if nobody's shooting at you, then a minefield is not really a problem. You just go slow. You probe where the mines are, you disarm the mines. A minefield becomes a problem when there are weapons pointed at it. So as you slow down, or as you encounter these mines and, you know, you encounter these minds and

take some casualties, so now you've got to be recovering that vehicle or recovering those injured troops. So you are now slowed down in a place where if the defensive position is well-designed, where you are maximally vulnerable to other weapon systems. And those could be a range of types, direct fire weapons, you know, machine guns, cannons, direct tank guns, certain types missiles and the like, which would cause, in this case, you know, if somebody, if I simplify, if I'm shooting at you with a machine gun, what you are and you are in a field, your natural instinct is go to find a hole in the ground and jump into it to get away from the bullet fire. And if you're able to do that, now you're secure issue. You're stuck where

you are, but I'm not going to hit you with that. But now I've got a, but if I have an interaction of weapon effects where I'm forcing you to go to ground, to slow down, to go into the ditch. And I've got indirect fire that is attacking you from above with a fragmentation and blast effect. You're now in a, what's the term? A world of hurt. Right. You're in the- Of a dilemma is what we would have said.

So that's the sort of dilemma which fortified those, it's those sorts of dilemmas, which the fortified complex is supposed to generate at scale across a large area. And both Soviet and Russian doctrine emphasizes this point very strongly, as indeed does, well, everybody, every professional army has these ideas. There's nothing actually all that mysterious about it. But Russian and Soviet doctrine perhaps is quite strong on the idea of, receiving of the fortified complex as a total fire system, which includes the physical, the static, observable physical defenses themselves, of a range of types, and also the various

weapons that are defending it, and the command and control and reconnaissance and other systems, which are supporting the integration of those effects. The main thing to consider there is, or an important thing to consider, therefore, is that it's a, you might say it's a network, it's a complex, but also that the fortification is not designed, it's not expected that a fortified area that your enemy is simply going to bounce off it, you know, if it's successful. If they attack it, they're just, you know, they're just going to be stopped. Generally speaking, that's not the way the defense enforcement. works in modern operations, with a partial exception of things like opposed amphibious landings,

where there is that potential to some greater or lesser extent. With a modern integrated defensive arrangement, like I described, you presume that your enemy is going to penetrate at places. And in fact, and the system is designed, if designed appropriately and enacted, capably, is to deal with penetrations by essentially, you know, your enemy produces a salient into your own defensive works. Your troops sort of move about it, elastically, ideally. And what you then create is what Russians often call a fire sack or a, right, which is essentially an area where your enemy now is concentrated in a salient, slowed by your defensive arrangements,

and maximally vulnerable to your defensive weapons, while also being, ideally, being, having its own offensive artillery support that much further from it, that much. So that's essentially how it's how it's supposed to work. People often think that, Or I guess I think people sometimes think that fortification is an alternative to combined arms or it's some kind of antithesis to combined arms. And I guess that would be my final point is that fortification is neither of those things. It's an integral part of combined arms operations. That's the way the Russians look at it. That's the way we used to look.

We, the West used to look at it and got out of the habit of doing so. And when, when operated correctly with sufficient resources, it's very, very, it can be, as we can see, it can be very, very powerful. Even in the 21st century with very precise, very powerful direct attack capability, which is more than enough to, you know, to blast through any particular fixed position. So I take your point that every modern military has some theory of the defense. And additionally, that the evidence is that this scheme is working. I think those are both, you know, essentially points that can't really be pushed back upon.

But I think it's fair to say that there's this, at least in the United States military, certainly in the Marine Corps, there's this sort of opinion about the nature. of the defense, its vulnerability to maneuver, certainly at scale. And the opinion goes something like basically since the defeat of the Maginot Line, you know, 1940 at the latest, we've known. We've known that digging in, I mean, obviously you're going to be in the defense here and there. It's unavoidable units are going to reach a culminating point.

We get all that. But at scale, this notion that you're going to have, you know, theater level defense and stake your, your, your, hopes of victory in that. Well, that's obsolete. We know. We know. The Blitzkrieg showed us that that's just not really, that's not the, that's not the stronger play. It's not likely to work. And I take your, the force of your argument here is, is that there's something wrong with that view. Can you say more about what people have been getting wrong there? Yeah. So the case you made, you just made is, I agree, one here's this a lot. It's reflected in doctrine. It's,

reflected in a good deal of the literature on modern warfare takes this view. Maginot, you know, if I say the words Maginot line to someone, even if they don't know what the Maginot line was, they know that Maginol line is a metonym in English usage for something that's failed and pointless, kind of equivalent to white elephant. And that's just because, you know, So the legend of Maginot, as this failed instrument of war, is so deeply embedded. Come with that is, at the very least, it's overstated. And actually, I'm inclined in most respects to say that it's just plain wrong. It gets the history of Maginot wrong.

Maginot line was gone around. That was the problem. The Maginot line wasn't fought through. And in that sense, yeah, okay, Maginot failed. It didn't fail as a fortification system. And even in the few places where there was fighting over Maginot forts, the French force it, the French forts were very difficult to take, even though the troops manning them were essentially third-rate.

They were pretty powerful. At the end, and so, you know, well, without going, into a bunch of quasi-revisionist history of Maginot, let's just say, I think that the case for it as the case against it is a bit superficial. So to narrowly, to bring it back to the American context, people often forget. And, well, you mentioned the Marine Corps, but the US Army ought to remember that the German field for the German fortifications round Mets, which on the other side of the, of the Franco-German border were a massive headache for Patton's army. They held up Patton's

army for three months in some of the most savage, difficult fighting of the war. Those fortifications were late 19th century and, well, actually, mid-to-late 19th century in origin with updates, with some updating, but they were mened by that point by by mixed bags of Wehrmacht troops and put up a very significant, we're a very significant challenge to arguably the best part of the U.S. Army in the last year, in the last months of the war where, you know, the allies had every material advantage. So the case against fortifications is, I think, tends to be, well, at any rate, overstated, as, as I said. The upshot of this is, is, and not that that became, was a particularly material importance to the United States or to the UK, for that matter, or other Western powers in many of the wars of the post-second World War, on account of the character of those wars, which were not high-intensity, peer-on-peer, interstate and the like.

So in effect, I think although throughout the Cold War, all of the most Western armies, certainly the United States, certainly Britain, maintained significant engineering capabilities, felt that they were going to do defense airland battle, which is a sort of signature idea of defense of Western Europe, which emerged from the early through to the, well, really mid-1980s through to the end of the Cold War, was essentially an idea about a fortified complex as the main defense against a hypothesized Warsaw Pact attack. But we got out of that habit in the post-Cold Cold War era and such that, you know, investment in things like military engineering airing capabilities diminished relative to other instruments. Things like, well, a while ago, I

mentioned the extensive character of current Russian field fortifications, how rapidly those were built. And that is possible because Russia continues to use, continues to employ things like specialized engineering trench digging machines. You know, you can see these things were designed in the 1950s. Most of them were procured in the late 1950s into the early 1960s. They're essentially 60-year-old vehicles, but they've got, one imagines a good, a good number of them, very effective with one of these ditch-dicking machines. You can, you know, you can probably dig five, six, seven hundred meters of trench depending on the ground in an hour, you know, one guy, one guy in a, in a vehicle. Okay, so the West got out of the habit of doing that and

convinced itself that, for lots of reasons, that it was able to fight and win wars decisively, ideally cheaply also, nonetheless, because of its superior ability to maneuver, which in turn would be based upon its superior perception of the reality of the ground, the movements of the enemy, the position of their own trips and so on and so forth. That's a logically powerful argument. I mean, and it had convinced, it had many, many people convinced of its truth through the 1990s, even into the early 2000s. But ultimately, it was overstated. It turns out that the fog of war is rather persistent.

You know, you lift it in one area and it descends it in another. Enemies are very creative. So if you find one way of dislocating them, and you don't completely destroy them, they tend to adapt and figure out now how not to do that thing again. If you continue to repeat what you did before, they then develop very effective techniques

for making you pay for hubris. So all I would say essentially is that I think that the case for light, for agile, for maneuverist, was over, has been over-extended and over-interpreted and has resulted in, and its over-application has resulted in forces which are too light. And also, when it turns out, not all that agile. You know, I don't know anybody, I think there would be few people, for example, who would describe NATO operations in Afghanistan over a 20-year period,

as being particularly agile. That was mostly static. Very, very, I think that's, yeah, get to your question. Can I ask? So this question of the, the, this assertion of the superiority of maneuverism has always been tied up with technology, right? Back to motorization and communicate, radio communications in the middle of the 20th century, up through, you know, I guess we're going to go look for examples of penetrating fortifications.

We would look at Iraq, right? Probably both times in Iraq. We have the U.S. military. Brits, others, very effectively and quickly punching through Iraqi fortifications. And that's tied up in technological advances on precision bombing, precision fires, right? And so an implication or premise, I guess, of the argument has always been that technology favors the offense, technology favors this vision of warfare. How do you assess, is it that the pendulum has swung?

And you think technology, you know, the role of drones and observation for fires that have in 2023 is now favoring the defense again, or is it just neutralized it? Is technology, it depends on who's using it more creatively? Like, just speak to that dimension of things, if you would. Well, I think you, you, you, you used the word pendulum, which begs the question, or rather suggests that you know the answer already. A pendulum, pendulum by definition is a thing which swings one way. and the other.

And to use the word pendulum in this context of the balance, let's say, between offense and defense, is implicitly to suppose that it moved from one to the other. And I think, you know, it's perfectly, not only perfectly reasonable, it's perfectly banal of military history, to look back on military history to be a very long story. of somebody coming up with an idea that wrong-foots or dislocates their enemy, and then people figuring out how to adapt to that or counter or do the same thing, and it swings back and forth. There's no doubt that in the case of Iraq, particularly Iraq, Kuwait of 1990-1991,

one, there was, there was, you know, that was clearly and unambiguous, a clear and unambiguous demonstration of very superior capability on the part of the coalition in the attack. There's no other way to interpret the lopsided casualty outcome, right? and not to mention the rapidity of the ground offensive and the like. And I wouldn't wish to deny that. I'd also say that I think that is a reasonable description of a period where the pendulum had swung quite hard to an extreme. And also it was that war took place under a set of conditions which were pretty,

which were in their nature very favorable. to the coalition arrayed against Iraq. There was the terrain itself being flat, open, untried, i.e., so, you know, essentially, quite hard to hide in. And even when you dig in, you would create a signature on the ground that would be, that was perfectly visible to aerial observation. and in a situation where one's opponent has complete air dominance to be stuck on the ground in static position,

that is positions that are observable from above, is to be essentially sitting in your own grave waiting for the hammer to come, which it did, no, but things didn't stay there. I mean, and in that case, and the rest of the world, notably Russia, and China observed that and took appropriate lessons from it. The second war, I think in many respects, you know, was a repeat of the first. It was in some ways even less, because unlike the first Gulf War where there was a very extensive, very air campaign proceeding and fundamentally, you know, the coalition

forces were very large. These were mass armies. by relatively speaking, the Iraqi coalition forces that went into Iraq in March, April 2003, were quite small. I think in total, they were probably like 63, 65,000, I think, something in that order. If you count the U.S., U.S., UK, and a handful of other nations involved. And the rate of advance was pretty extraordinary again. When it comes down to it, though, Iraq was pretty prostrate by that time. That was essentially broke, was politically moribund, exhausted socially.

So in other words, there were a number of points where it was reasonable to think, well, something has happened here that has made Western Armed Forces equipped with these sorts of integrated digital, you know, allowing it to, capabilities, allowing it to see, to strike, to move all more fluidly and accurately had produced something pretty extraordinary. And enemies, enemies adapt to that. And they ultimately, they can acquire the same capabilities, which brings us back to the current conflict, where I think one of the sort of, sort of, intriguing things about the confirmation of the Russian defense is the way that one of the reasons why it has been so successful and of keeping the Ukrainian attacks in the crumple zone is that,

you know, the Russians have the wherewithal now also to integrate fire capabilities to observe. Now, these are coming, and they're coming from low-cost instruments, which would be available to a lot of players, which is a long answer to my earlier statement, that it's a pendulum, it swings back and forth. And any technique, any tactic or technique, if repeated, will ultimately be adapted to, it'll stop working. In fact, and if you continue to do the same thing, it will diminish, it will not just diminish in its effectiveness as you're at a me adapts, it will become a vulnerability for you. If you'll forgive me, one last question.

I know we're going a little bit past the time we had discussed, but this is really, really interesting. Sticking with Iraq for a second, I take your point that, you know, it's hard, as it were, to draw, but you can't draw eternal conclusions from anything, but it's hard to draw very firm conclusions on these questions of maneuver versus, you know, positional defense or something like that, given the fact that you're not dealing with two equal entities, right? you have, even if it's a smaller force in some ways, the smaller force in the second example makes the case stronger. You have an enormous qualitative difference in both cases that scrambles

the example. It doesn't make it a pure test. And so my question for you about 2023 is what, what do you think would happen if we had, you know, a armored mechanized NATO force with all of the bells and whistles, aviation, and so forth, conducting this offensive rather than, you know, Ukrainian military that even with the support it's receiving has been fighting now for some time is, I have this impression of the Ukrainians and Russians, it's almost like two tired boxers, kind of hanging on to each other. My question is, is this the success of the defense require, as it were, some exhaustion on the part of the offense?

Or do you think if it took the full brunt of a modern NATO attack, would it survive? It's a cute way of asking, what should we be taking away from this as we look at it? What lesson should we be learning? Yeah, a good friend described the Russell Ukraine War as two drunk dinner ladies banging at each other with breakfast trays. And his point being that there's not much you can take from this. You know, boxers don't watch, you know, professional boxers, boxers don't watch bum fights to get point, you know, to get pointers on how to win professional boxing matches.

I disagree with that point of view. And in response to specifically to your question, we can I think hypothesize, let's say there was a large, a multi-divisional combined arms, you know, effective professional combined arms force with integrated supply chain, with capable commanders. that was supported by a home population that was determined in its support of the war. You know, imagine, so if we had something like the American Army 1990, but fighting with the sorts of domestic support that it enjoyed during the Second World War, and Russia was exactly what it is now, then, yeah, I think, well, that would certainly, I'm willing to, I would, I would suggest that, yes, they would have an easier time, or they would have performed better than had, then have the Ukrainians thus far. That said, you have to hypothesize that force because it doesn't exist. What is this NATO force you're, you're talking about? There isn't, there, there, there isn't one. The UK, the UK's main battle tank fleet. is, I think on the books is something like 200 to 250 Challenger to Tanks.

Realistically, maybe 150 of those are capable of operating. They're, you know, and we haven't, you know, we haven't, these are not Challenger 3. We haven't gone through this supposed updating to Challenger 3 status. So basically, these are 1990 vintage. main battle tanks in very low numbers, operated by an army, which is the smallest that has been since Cromwell. And the UK is, I think still, the largest European military force. France may have surpassed us barely at this point. But at any rate, that's the state of affairs. The American Army, aside from the fact that it's on the wrong side of the ocean, isn't in much, much better shape.

I'm sure that the Americans can scrape together more of a tank force more than than the UK. Bottom line is that you have to hypothesize this NATO force. It's not a practical reality. It doesn't exist today. So you want to ask, even if you take nuclear weapons off the table, which is stupid today, you ought to ask, how would NATO perform if NATO was doing the fighting against? I'm not sure that they'd do much better than the Ukrainians have done so far. Ukrainians have been very adaptive, certainly extremely determined.

Nobody, I think, would disagree that they fought with very great determination and valor. and a good deal of creativity, despite which they've been hammered. They have been, and the result, I think, is inevitable. Russian casualties have been hugely exaggerated in the Western press, in large part because Western intelligence agencies act as the strategic communications arm, primarily they're part of the information campaign, They're not part of sort of, they're not in the business of making public valid intelligence estimates. What they're in the business of is reinforcing communicates, strategic, strat comms narratives, essentially.

Anyway, that's sort of a long answer, but the bottom line is the question is moot because the, the course that you, that would be required to make the, to make the question valid doesn't exist. the forces which do exist, I don't think, are particularly more capable than the Ukrainians at this point. And there aren't enough of them. And they don't have enough ammunition? Yeah. Well, certainly, no, no. It was recently announced by the United States that it had the ambition by late 2024 to be able to produce 155 heavy artillery shells at a rate of 85,000 per month. by late 2024.

I think, and that was, if I recall correctly, that would be multiplying current production by over five times. So you work out the mass, basically. You know, currently we are able to produce what relative to expenditure rates is a trivial amount of ammunition. And nobody's standing in place. It's not like the Russians are, the Russians are, the Russians are, you know, sitting back and doing nothing.

They are ramping up what already was a large production. It was estimated, there was an estimate at the beginning of the conflict, or towards the beginning of the conflict, when the artillery war was especially intensifying. And it was reckoned that, and so you'd have seen reports that Russian heavy artillery expenditure was hitting 50 or even plus, 50,000 per day, which is a gigantic expenditure, we'll all agree. The assessment at that time, based on reasonably secure estimates of the Soviet stockpile was that they could keep up that

rate of expenditure for five and a half years without producing one new artillery shell. Meanwhile, they are producing artillery shows. So there's a long way to catch up before the West. NATO has an answer to an industrial, mass-based, attritional sort of warfare. I think this war will continue for quite some time, but it'll be finished long before, long before. It'll be finished, at any rate, before NATO's wanted conventional rearmament has even really begun. David Betts, professor of modern war at King's College London, has been a totally fascinating conversation. Thank you for being so generous with your time and for coming on the show. You're welcome.

It was a real pleasure. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.