Ep 132: Michal Kofman on the Battlefield in Ukraine (War in Ukraine #4)
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
Aaron B. MacLean:
This episode, a continuation of our miniseries on the war in Ukraine today with Michael Kofman is a companion piece to the recording we did with Stephen Kotkin 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 Kofman, we'll do the same thing, but focusing more on the battlefield and the operational end of things. Let's get into it.
For maps, videos and images, follow us on Instagram and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today Michael Kofman. 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.
Michael Kofman:
Yeah, thanks for having me on your podcast.
Aaron B. MacLean:
You're also a contributor recently to War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy and the Return of a Fractured World, edited by our friend Hal Brands. And the chapter that you contributed is our main focus for today. 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, this is what you do. You focus on the Russian military and all of a sudden everyone is focused on you because everyone is focused on the Russian military. What have you learned about Russia's military in its capacity as a result of this war? What assumptions have you had to revise? What is the intellectual history of the war in Ukraine for Michael Kofman?
Michael Kofman:
That's a pretty big open-ended question. That might be the entirety of the podcast right there.
Aaron B. MacLean:
Well, let's go for it. We'll get into it.
Michael Kofman:
So the way I look at it, I'm a military analyst probably first in terms of what I do professionally, but the job is ultimately interdisciplinary and it involves looking at military history. It involves thinking about strategy. It involves thinking about defense analysis of writ large, and of course, a little bit of theory to help form the practice. I think that looking at this particular case 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 Russian invasion is fundamentally driven by political assumptions and is meant to be complimentary 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 were trained to organize to fight, really the way any force would train and organize to fight.
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. It would be initially, but so you could tell that the Washington 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.
We looked at exercises. We looked at cases of use of force; the Russia-Georgia War; military reform; monetization 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, 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 with armed forces, but it was still very much undercooked. If that makes any sense. So to 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 of when it comes to effectiveness of military power. It's not what you have but how you use it.
But 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, and 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. As analysts, we tend to war 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. 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, 'cause you can be surprised.
You have Pearl Harbor events. People said this about the Japanese before Pearl Harbor 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 surprised. The Russian military really struggled at first to conduct operations at scale, although it adapted and evolved over time. The second was, I think, really overestimated the quality of the force, fundamentals training. And that's because partly because of assumptions that they had run enough people through Syria and had invested training over the course of those years, partly just because of real lack of visibility. Because of how the Russian military does training, which is 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 Russia armed forces as well. And culture has a tendency to eat doctrine for breakfast, especially when you get involved in combat operations.
On balance, I think we overestimated, or at least I overestimated what the Russian military could do and could execute, and certainly 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. 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 peace time developed operational concepts that they had employed in Syria and other places, but in a very boutique capacity and in a permissive environment. To put it another way to anybody listening to this. In a place where it was very easy and they could control the pace of events and how they employed these capabilities, when they attempted to do this in Ukraine, this fairly quickly came apart, and it took him 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, we've seen them 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 ability to adapt and learn over time, deploying new technologies in the force, evolve the technologies that they had and start getting better at employing the concepts that they couldn't initially execute in the force. I don't know if I did that topic justice to your fairly open question.
Aaron B. MacLean:
Oh, no, I have a follow-up. It's really interesting. I have a follow-up, and 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 first, if you divide the war into two is one of the ways you divide it in your chapter and that initial operation. I'm just going to state what you said in a compressed, maybe slightly radical version, then you tell me if I've heard you correctly.
From what you've just said, it sounds like actually 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, the Russian military that rendered them incapable of that. It wasn't 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've 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? Just say more if you would.
Michael Kofman:
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. 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 positioned Ukraine well to defend against that type of operation, so it hinged on a couple battles. The reason I want to say that is that there's a tendency when you look back in the 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 an 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 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. There was no way that those assumptions were going to interact with reality in the way that would prove favorable to the Russian operation. And a second, the way they're employing the force was fundamentally irrational from the standpoint of basic logic of military strategy and concentration of 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 try to very rapidly advance into Ukraine on multiple competing front in an effort to quickly capture the country and then transition to an occupation phase. 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 was available, and they were attempting to employ it at peacetime for 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 and how the force was used. 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 did people like me think before the war? Also, I think that we believe that the Russian leadership would have all these assumptions and would hand the football over to the general staff, which would organize a combined arms operation that would recognize that would be a hard fight and then they would have to engage the Ukrainian military. We rationalized it, and we forgot that actually political assumptions very strongly shape the military strategy and the military strategy flows from them, and the concept of operations is going to be determined by those assumptions.
Even if that doesn't make any sense to us what Russian leadership was thinking, it certainly made sense to them. So in some respects, they threw the better part of their force away in the first couple of weeks, and Ukraine mounted the very valiant defense. Although, a couple of asterisks in there, one, external factors proved significant that as 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 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 to this? 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 local side where the greatest difference was between expectations and what actually transpired, it was probably actually less on than the assessment of the Russian forces and more on the assessment of the Ukrainian forces.
Aaron B. MacLean:
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 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 with the period, the more that structure matters. And that 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, to be clear, I am a supporter of. But then it transitions into a widespread optimism about Ukraine's military prospects, and I think we saw those just objectively speaking, run into some pretty hard walls in 2023. Talk about that. Talk about 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-
Michael Kofman:
Sure. Sure.
Aaron B. MacLean:
... and periodization gets more complicated here, but it's a 45-minute podcast.
Michael Kofman:
No, I understand. Yeah, of course. Yeah. 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 first, 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 that are proven wrong, and that's what happened at the oust of the war. 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 not 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 think there was a tendency of overcorrection where Ukraine military did far better than we expected, but then I think there was a degree of success in terms of Ukrainian strategic communication and shaping and wealth and in shifting our mindset to some extent properties to what they could do. But also I think to an 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 the prepared defense. If I was going to summarize first why the offensive was necessary, well, politically, Ukraine pegged success in this war to liberation of occupied territory, so we had to conduct offensive operations. There's no other way to do it, right? That's problem one. Problem two was that Ukraine political leadership consistently felt the need to conduct offensives in order to maintain external support.
Because Ukraine's military effort was heavily dependent on external material assistance and the other parties involved were defacto material parties to the war, it created a great deal of internal pressure and gave them a sense that every couple of months they had to retake the initiative along the front line. 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 defensive. 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. That was the sense of the need for impetus. Otherwise, Ukraine will disappear from the front page. It'll be like the Afghanistan effect. If you remember that war where Afghanistan started showing up on pages 20 plus in the paper?
Aaron B. MacLean:
I remember well.
Michael Kofman:
Yep. Those of us who remember those wars remember how war could get forgotten over time if there's as much happening. And the way the war is covered does create pressure because if you look at the typical coverage, it's either gloom and doom or, we're back. And if there's not much happening, news desks immediately begin to declare it's a stalemate. So this was I think the driver to some extent, and then the assumptions going in. So if I was to summarize them, I would say first there was a degree of unrealistic assessment or insufficient value assigned to a prepared defense and how difficult it is to overcome prepared defense historically and the military history of conventional war, especially of contemporary war, shows how challenging it is to do this and what the pieces you need to try to put together 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, that all the problems on the Russian side, deficits of the forces, insufficiently-prepared lines, structural manpower problems, et cetera, et cetera, this situation was significantly reversed post- mobilization and entrenchment and the 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 intangibles. 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 from 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. 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 colloquially nicknamed the cult offensive, the belief that, "Oh, if you just have the will, you could overcome these things," and work consistently shows that 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 as just assuming that a successful combined arms maneuver is going to break the opponent's will, but most of the time that doesn't. Actually, you need to achieve these things in order to have success. So the last part I'll add to here is that I think the offensive was very much a conventionally-planned defensive from the maneuver school of thought. And there you can definitely see strong Western influences from the U.S. and UK 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. It is a military that is driven fundamentally by fires and is more oriented towards attritional and positional warfare than maneuver.
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 a Western force that we've had a lot more time to prepare and train, that would've had much more significant support, greater advantages and enablers and all that. So I think analysts looking at the offensive in the run-up to it were a bit pessimistic, but cautious in their discussion of what could take place. 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. 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. On top of all these challenges, land warfare strongly tends to favor the defense, and that's not a new finding.
Aaron B. MacLean:
Yeah. So on that 80,000 foot plane, let me ask my next question. I want to get to the present day and what you think that Ukraine ought to do and what you think America ought to do as we think about the future of this war. But before we get there, just 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 role played by fires that's quite dominant? You've seen several maneuver gambits fail. Are we back?
This is very blunt and kind of crude, but are we in a situation like we were in the first World War where there are these new technologies in those days, say, machine guns today, unmanned vehicles, the sensor strike complex and everything that entails that we just haven't figured out there's post machine gun pre-blitzkrieg? 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. How do you think about this?
Michael Kofman:
Yeah, so I think about this along two planks. The first is to be a maneuver, warfare is really an initial period of war game. Prolonged conventional wars between major powers have extended attritional phases. They do come down to reconstitution, replacement of the better parts of your force that you've lost, defense industrial mobilization. So maneuver warfare is a conversation typically had amongst peacetime militaries with great peacetime concepts that are heavily dependent upon advanced technology and fairly complex or sophisticated levels of integration, seamless and getting all the stuff to operate together. But it's something that won't solve for the prolonged periods of attrition that you will end up in a long war.
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 it is that I don't think manure 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. The way you have to earn it on the battlefield 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.
Aaron B. MacLean:
We have a lot of Army majors, we take all kinds on School of War.
Michael Kofman:
Right. Right. Right.
Aaron B. MacLean:
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 [inaudible 00:25:32]
Michael Kofman:
Yeah, no. No offense meant to any Majors listening this that are writing their next doctrinal thesis. Okay, but this particular war, what it does show is a couple interesting things. First, you have to deal with cheap persistent high fidelity ISR, which is when it comes to maneuver warfare, it's very hard to achieve surprise, and it's very hard to concentrate. This force this war shows that both sides have had to substantially disperse both on the offense and the defense, and you see this increasing tenancy of terrain being held by much smaller unit sizes. 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 recons and why it's so difficult to mass either on offense and 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. From anti-tank guided 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 and the infantry map. 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 and what have you. Ukraine offense have ran into significant challenges and stopped early on, not because of modern technologies that are particularly distinct to this battlefield.
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 breakup, the things like first-person view drones came to dominate the battlefield and deny maneuver in daytime. I just want to lay out this history clear. I was there in July myself during the middle of this thing in the south. So to me, it's still clear as day. And so the problems were the same problems Amy Forest would've faced 50 years ago attempting a maneuver operation, a breaching effort against the well-prepared defense, without having it established these advantages, without having the enablers that then would answer and neutralize the advantages of the other side.
I will add, to be clear, lots of folks listening to this will say, "Hey, we can mass, we can do these things on large scale." Actually, the war 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 just because you can't mass doesn't mean that you would choose to and don't believe that both sides engaged in this war, it hasn't occurred to them that they could just mass. These are both militaries that have enough experience fighting each other the last two years that many of the things that occurred to observers have occurred to them too. Also, the other alibi, which is, "Well, we have air power, we'll achieve air superiority." When 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 munitions anyway to sustain it prolong conventional war, even if they had the 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. 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 1000 feet or a couple of hundred feet of the battlefield, you wouldn't have these to 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 overinvesting in just that as our typical way of not wanting to learn the right lessons.
Aaron B. MacLean:
Feel free to challenge the premise of this question, but if at the heart of what makes the defense so potent in this war and what allows historically relatively 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? My mind goes to it as thinking about the problem. You have that air superiority is one alibi. Another alibi I'm generating in real time as I ask this question is, well, what if I can cyber and electronic warfare my way out of this conundrum? I can almost do a 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?
Michael Kofman:
Okay, so on cyber, I have a bit of dim view of cyber and conventional warfare. I think it was relevant in the opening of this war and a couple other moments where Russia conducted fairly targeted cyber attacks. But in general, in conventional war, I tend to see cyber as more of a sideshow or as a component of intelligence operations more so than anything else. Because in most cases, for the facts you're trying to achieve, you're much better off either with electronic warfare being employed for defense, which I'll get 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. You could 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 production rates, air defense intercept rates, so on, so on, so forth, and all the fundamentals.
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 convention wars. People thought were expected and assumed. Also, it's interesting how militaries and countries prove quite resilient to it, and the reversible effects of cyber are such that the advantage is going to give you probably will be not that significant or big picture. On our track warfare, this is one area where we did not overestimate the Russian military. I want to be very clear. This has actually proven incredibly important from the very beginning of the war, has only grown in importance as both sides have gotten very good effective employing electronic warfare.
It emerged as a natural counter to proliferation of uncrewed systems. It is used extensively in support of fires as an alternative way of finding 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 fracture side and the fact that large-scale conventional war is not like it is in training. And the weapons and capabilities they used in the training that worked then in a permissive environment, in a contested environment where your own force is doing half or more than half of the EW effects against your capabilities, I'm sorry, I'm just now remembering all the challenges Russia's had early on, again, fairly significant to detrimental effect. Today I see that the contest on crewed systems EW continues to evolve and continues to advance in the qualitative dimension.
EW proliferated and became small across the front down to the point of any infantry man having a trainee double 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-enabled terminal guidance when they've reached the target so that even when the command signal's broken, the drone can then auto target and fly itself to hit a vehicle. So this continues to be 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. 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 of their combat potential.
And what you basically have is you have a lot of equipment and a lot of manpower, but a very small thin slice of the force fighting at any given time, typically, a platoon company level. Second, you have positional fighting that's highly routinized, 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, and so you have routinized warfare over the same terrain. Third, you have such a small scale in terms offensive, defensive operations that essentially a company commander who is courting an assault by several assault detachments that day and each detachment is 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 'cause 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 division-level fires assets are available to somebody at that junior level because everybody's been sitting in the same place for the last year dug in.
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 will say is keep in mind this: Both revolutionaries and traditionals have a point in commenting on technological innovation and changes or perceived change to the character award. 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 have 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 to have that point of view. On the other hand, many revolutions are declared and very few arrive in practice. Traditionalists also have a fair point of view, and I tend to side more traditionals than not. I'm more of a conservative analyst 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. You can have a system that was very, very significant in one war be almost completely irrelevant to another one. The TB2 Bayraktar drone was decisive for Azerbaijan over Armenia in 2020 in the Nagorno-Karabakh 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 to give you an example, one technology was very significant in one war versus another.
Aaron B. MacLean:
Final question for you. It's big one, so take it at whatever length of response you want to offer up. So we had your co-contribution to War on Ukraine, Stephen Kotkin on, a really fascinating conversation as you would expect. And he had a interesting proposal for how to proceed for Ukraine and for 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 full liberation of every captured inch of Ukraine. The question then becomes how do you put yourself in a place to negotiate that conclusion in a way that's most favorable to Ukrainian and American interests and least favorable to Russian interests?
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 as favorable a direction as possible under the circumstances. It's not going to be something to celebrate, but you could potentially get something that's not essentially negotiating Ukraine's defeat. What is your view on the road ahead for Ukraine? What is the approach that they should adopt to achieve the most favorable outcome they can in your view?
Michael Kofman:
Yeah, not an easy question. I know Steve's views. I've heard him say that before. I think it's interesting. I would beg to respectfully differ because I don't understand the mechanism by which one will achieve that in Russia. And few people are as knowledgeable on personal 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 authoritarian regimes are incredibly good at proofing themselves and eliminating viable alternatives. So this is not only very difficult to achieve, but even harder to predict, that it's going to be incredibly difficult to predict the regime changes on a personal authoritarian system. Lastly, you should be careful what you wish for because Germans, for example, worked very hard to get London reintroduced back into imperial Russia and in 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. 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 just saying in contingency be cautious, although I'm a person of the mind that we'd be far better off with 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 whole 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 optimists, 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, the overriding principle was the thesis behind it or the theory of success that if Ukrainian forces could successfully break the Russian defense in the South, they could then hold Crimea at risk, make the Russian position Crimea untenable under the assumption that Russian leadership value 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 a 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 that something like this could be done.
I think overall the vision hasn't changed. The challenge is that it doesn't look like Ukraine will be able to conduct another major offense 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. This is problem one. So this is the current priority. Simultaneously, Ukraine has to rebuild its military and rebuild its combat potential. It dug itself in a pretty deep manpower hole, and that's going to take the better part of a year to stabilize and reconstitute the force.
This is a persistent challenge for any military in year two, year three of award. 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 have the prospect of holding Russian positions in Ukraine at 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 that 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 and that the Long War still favors them and that this is essentially a cost-free strategy.
Because if there are no costs to you, if nobody's striking your critical infrastructure, destroying things you value, it is cost-free bombardment strategy. So this is essentially the third part of it, but most of it's oriented towards setting the condition. If the framing of war termination on favorable terms sounds too rosy now, and in many respects I think that's a fair assessment and you should keep in mind that it's no less important that at the very least 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. Also, that how this war ends, there's a fair chance will lead to another war, a 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 very least 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 long-term commitment that will ensure that anything that Ukraine ultimately agrees to is not simply a rearmament period for Russia where Ukraine is left in the lurch, but that western countries will actually invest in Ukrainian forces long term. So that Ukraine is not signing up for a Russian rearmament period and then a defeat in the third war, which is a consistent war 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 paperwork'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 formal concessions to Russia either.
Aaron B. MacLean:
Michael Kofman, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, contributor 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.
Michael Kofman:
Thanks for having me on your podcast.
Aaron B. MacLean:
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