Western expert: an officer from the First World War, looking at the battles in Ukraine, would not have thought that more than a century had passed
The expert of the military-analytical publication 19FortyFive, Robert Farley, decided to sum up the preliminary results and draw some conclusions from the Ukrainian military campaign. The author began a series of publications consisting of three parts, in which, as he said in the preamble, "he will try to draw some lessons from the conduct of the Russian-Ukrainian war at the moment." The first part analyzes the actions of the ground forces.
The author, covering the beginning of the special operation, reports that in the first weeks the initiative was completely on the side of the RF Armed Forces. Everything changed as soon as the Armed Forces of Ukraine began to receive Western weapons. There was a moment when experts even started talking that the active use of anti-tank systems by the Ukrainian infantry, in particular Javelin, against Russian armored vehicles generally ends the era of effective use tanks in land warfare.
These discussions stopped when it became obvious that without the use of the traditional armored vehicles-infantry-artillery triad, offensive operations would be at least difficult to carry out. It is not for nothing that Kyiv has been persistently demanding modern tanks and armored vehicles from its Western allies throughout the entire conflict.
The military campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s, mostly conducted by NATO forces in various parts of the world, seemed to show that in modern warfare the traditional role of artillery has faded into the background. Experts began to argue that aviation faster and more efficiently can do the work that was once left to the clumsy artillery gun.
But events in Ukraine have shown that artillery still successfully fulfills the role of the "god of war" in ground operations, if one army is opposed to another. Barreled guns and rocket launchers are used with high efficiency by both sides both in defense and offensive. In fact, since the First World War, with regard to the use of artillery, only its characteristics have changed - the range, the power of the projectiles and the accuracy of destruction.
Initially, Russia was counting on a short military operation against Ukraine, Farley believes. But the campaign has dragged on for a long time and, moreover, it may continue for a very long time. In such a situation, both sides were not quite ready in terms of the stock of weapons and ammunition for long-term hostilities.
Both Ukraine and Russia used ammunition at unacceptable rates at times
- notes the author.
Farley, operating on unverified information, claims that Russia had to turn to Belarus, North Korea and Iran for help in replenishing armaments. Ukraine, in turn, has almost completely switched to supply from the Western allies. And then it turned out that NATO did not have enough stocks to wage a high-intensity war, and now the countries of the alliance are struggling to meet the needs of Ukraine.
In short, each country must be prepared for the fact that its short war may drag on.
the expert concludes.
An important role in the Ukrainian conflict was shown by modern communication systems. Elon Musk's Starlink satellite network helped the Ukrainian military to keep in touch and keep abreast of the situation, which made it possible not only to build complex self-sustaining defensive structures, but also to conduct mobile offensive operations.
At the beginning of the special operation, the RF Armed Forces had serious problems with establishing both horizontal and vertical channels of communication. Various outdated systems could not communicate with each other, and the use of commercial technology (mobile phones) often made it possible to successfully strike Ukrainian artillery, the expert said. Later, the Russian command took a number of measures to solve these problems.
In general, the expert concludes, the Ukrainian conflict has shown that little has changed in modern large-scale confrontations on land since the First World War.
There is no doubt that the armies fighting in Ukraine today are more technologically advanced than the armies that fought on the Western Front in 1917. At the same time, there was little that an infantry or artillery captain of 1917 would find incomprehensible about the fighting in the Donbass.
Farley is sure.
According to the author, an officer of the First World War, looking at the battles in Ukraine, would not have thought that more than a century had passed.
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