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Ryuu96 on 10 July 2024
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“We have probably made some bad assumptions because over the last 20 years we were launching precision weapons against people that could not do anything about it,” said retired Lt. Gen. a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “Now we are doing it against a peer opponent, and Russia and China do have these capabilities.”

Western military doctrine has long relied on a belief that precision can defeat mass—meaning that well-targeted strikes can cripple a more numerous enemy, reducing the need for massive expenditure on troops, tanks and artillery.

That proposition, however, had not been tested in a major war until Ukraine. The introduction of Western weapons there showed that what may have worked against Saddam Hussein's army, the Taliban or Islamic State guerrillas won't necessarily perform against a modern military like Russia's or China's.

One of the lessons learned in Ukraine is about the continuing importance of old-school unguided artillery shells, the manufacturing of which is only now beginning to pick up in the U.S. and Europe after decades of decline, said Lt. Gen. Esa Pulkkinen, the permanent secretary of Finland's defense ministry. "They are immune to any type of jamming, and they will go to target regardless of what type of electronic warfare capability there may be," he said.

For Ukraine, time is an essential factor—and the carefully limited and gradual introduction of many Western systems has provided Russia with the ability to minimize their impact. "Warfare is about the speed of adaptation," said retired Air Marshal Edward Stringer, a former head of operations at the British Ministry of Defense. "If you drip-feed an antibiotic weekly, you'll actually train the pathogen—and we have trained the pathogen….We didn't need to give them that time, but we did."

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Another reason why slowness, escalation management and drip-feeding weapons has been awful policy.