National

security.

 RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR

Ukraine and the Future of Offensive

Maneuver
Stephen Biddle
November 22, 2022
Commentary
Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a two-part series on the contemporary
challenges to offensive maneuver based on observations from the war in Ukraine, and
the implications for the U.S. Army.

For months, commentary on Ukraine focused on stalemate and the prospect that
changing technology augured a looming age of defense dominance in warfare. Russia’s
assault on Kyiv had failed. Its assault on Odessa had ground to a halt well short of the
city. Its offensive in eastern Ukraine had stalled. Ukraine’s much-anticipated
counteroffensive in the south had made limited early progress, and Ukraine’s defense
minister had said that Ukraine lacked the materiel to take ground on any large scale. A
spring and summer of intense combat had produced almost no meaningful change in
territorial control. 

Many saw this pattern as a harbinger of profound change in warfare. In this view, tanks,
piloted aircraft, surface warships, and massed infantry formations were now just large,
slow targets for small, cheap, precision weapons. As weapons have grown more
accurate and lethal, the argument holds, concentrated formations operating in the open
had become unable to survive long enough to overrun enemy positions. Surprise had
become impossible in the face of long-range surveillance by drones and airborne radar.
Breakthrough had thus become unachievable, and exploitation would be impossible
even if breakthrough were not. In the 21st century, the kinds of sweeping, decisive
offensive maneuver seen in the German conquest of France in 1940, or the Six Day War
of 1967, or Operation Desert Storm in 1991 were thus a thing of the past, many claimed.

This analysis now seems premature. Ukraine’s September counteroffensive in Kharkiv

recaptured more than 6,000 square kilometers of Russian-held ground in less than two
weeks. Kharkiv was followed by substantial Ukrainian advances in northern Kherson in
early October and the recapture of the rest of the oblast west of the Dnipro in mid-
November. Tanks and other armored vehicles played a major role in both offensives,
and further gains look likely. This sudden change in battlefield fortunes has pushed
Russian President Vladimir Putin into a politically risky partial mobilization. Recent
events certainly seem inconsistent with an expectation of epochal change to a
technologically determined era of defense dominance. 

What, then, actually is happening in Ukraine and what does the pattern of outcomes
mean for the future, and for defense planning in the United States and elsewhere?
Humility is in order, of course. Both the stalemate of the summer and the breakthroughs
of the fall surprised many, and there may be more surprises in store. Many new
technologies are in use, and both sides are learning and adapting rapidly. So conclusions
drawn now, in the midst of the fighting, must always be tentative and preliminary. 

But perceptions take root early all the same, so it is important for analysts to shape these
as accurately as possible even while events unfold. And for now, the best understanding
is that offensive maneuver is far from dead. In fact, the patterns visible so far actually
look a lot more like the past than like any new model of revolutionary transformation.
And the policy prescriptions that follow from the transformation interpretation look
correspondingly premature: calls for retiring tanks in favor of drones, or reframing
military doctrine to avoid offensive action, are a poor fit to the actual pattern of combat
observable to date in Ukraine.
Variations in Force Employment

This pattern has involved both successful offense and successful defense from the
beginning of the war. Russia’s initial invasion was poorly executed in many ways, yet it
gained over 110,000 square kilometers of ground in less than a month. Ukraine’s Kyiv
counteroffensive retook over 50,000 square kilometers in March and early April. Battle
lines then mostly stabilized in spite of heavy Russian offensive pressure in late spring
and summer before Ukraine’s fall counteroffensives. But whereas the September
Kharkiv counteroffensive broke through quickly and drove the Russians from large
parts of the eastern theater in days, Ukraine’s Kherson counteroffensive made only
limited progress for over a month in spite of major efforts and heavy Ukrainian
casualties. 

These variations are hard to square with any technologically determined epoch. All of
this – both the breakthroughs and the stalemates – has occurred in the face of small,
cheap, precise 21st century weapons. Tanks played prominent roles in both the
breakthroughs and the stalemates. 

The real difference appears to have been major variation in force employment at the
tactical and operational level, coupled with a mass mobilization of Ukrainian reservists,
few of whom have been armed with precision weapons. Defenses that were initially
undermanned (on Ukraine’s northern front) and shallow and unprepared (on Ukraine’s
southern front), enabled rapid advances. Russians who initially sacrificed security for
speed in these advances moved in unsupported road-bound columns that outran their
logistics and suffered heavy losses that then left them vulnerable to counterattack
against their overextended positions. 

Conversely, defenses that were deep and well-prepared, such as Ukraine’s positions in
the east, were much less vulnerable and could be pushed back only by attackers who
advanced cautiously with heavy fire support. As Ukrainian mobilization produced an
army large enough to fill gaps and constitute a meaningful reserve, an undersized
Russian invasion force was compelled to adopt defensive postures in Kherson and
Kharkiv and to make choices in the allocation of inadequate forces. They chose to
defend deep, prepared positions in Kherson with their better units and to accept risk in
Kharkiv with thinner, unsupported defenses manned by lower-quality units while
continuing their slow-moving attrition offensive toward Bakhmut. 

This produced slow progress for the Russians at Bakhmut and in the initial Ukrainian
offensive at Kherson, but breakthrough and rapid advance by the Ukrainians at Kharkiv.
Russian logistical vulnerability on the west side of the Dnipro in Kherson contributed to
Ukrainian progress there in early October and the fall of Kherson city in November. But
throughout, it has been difficult for either side to make rapid headway or produce clean
breakthroughs against deep, prepared, well-motivated defenses supported by meaningful
reserves and viable supply lines. By contrast, both sides have been able to make much
faster progress against shallow defenses without significant reserves behind them, and
especially so when the defenders lacked commitment to the cause for which they fought
and when supply lines could not be maintained. 

Repeating Lessons From the History of Land Warfare

This should not be surprising. In fact, it encapsulates the modern history of land
warfare. Since at least 1917 it has been very hard to break through properly supplied
defenses that are disposed in depth, supported by operational reserves, and prepared
with forward positions that are covered and concealed (and especially so without air
superiority). This combination enforced the great trench stalemate on the Western Front
in World War I. 

But this pattern has persisted long after that. In the popular imagination, World War II
replaced trench stalemate with a war of maneuver. But mid- and late-war offensives
against properly prepared defenses commonly produced results that looked less like
blitzkrieg and more like the slow, costly, grinding advance of the Hundred Days
offensives of 1918. Concentrated, armor-heavy attackers at the Mareth Line in 1943,
Kursk in 1943, Operations Epsom, Goodwood, or Market Garden in 1944, the Siegfried
Line in 1944, or the Gothic Line in 1944-45 all failed to produce quick breakthroughs
and devolved into slow, methodical slogs at best, and “death rides of the armored
divisions” (as historian Alexander McKee characterized Goodwood) at worst. 

Nor did this pattern end in 1945. Iraqi armored offensives bogged down against even
moderately deep Iranian defenses at Khorramshahr and Abadan in 1980-81, and Iranian
offensives failed to penetrate prepared Iraqi defenses in depth at Basra in 1987. More
recently, the 1999 battle of Tsorona between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Israeli invasion of
South Lebanon in 2006, and Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia in 2008 all showed a
similar pattern wherein mechanized offensives made slow progress when they
encountered deep, prepared defenses. 

Of course there have also been dramatic offensive successes since 1917. The German
invasion of France in 1940 knocked the French out of World War II in a month. The
German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 destroyed over 100 Soviet divisions and
advanced to the gates of Moscow in a season. Operation Cobra in 1944 broke through
German lines and retook most of metropolitan France in a month. The Israeli invasion
of the Sinai in 1967 triumphed in just six days. The American counteroffensive in
Operation Desert Storm in 1991 evicted the Iraqis from Kuwait in 100 hours of ground
fighting. The 2020 Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh drove the Armenians
from the Aras River Valley in less than two months. 

Force Employment and Combat Outcomes

But this pattern does not suggest any epochal transition from defense dominance in
World War I to offense dominance in World War II and after to some new era of
defense now dawning in the 21st century. Instead, as I argue in my book, Military
Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, the reality of war since at least
1917 has been a consistently powerful relationship between force employment — the
tactics and operational methods adopted by the combatants — and combat outcomes in
the face of progressively more lethal firepower. Where defenses have been deep,
supported by operational reserves and well-prepared at the front, quick blitzkrieg
success has been all but impossible over more than a century of changing technology.
Well-trained, astutely employed attackers with numerical superiority can take ground
against such defenses, but slowly and at great cost. Clean breakthroughs followed by
exploitation and the decisive conquest of large theaters has long required a permissive
opponent  — that is, a defender who lacks depth, who has failed to withhold a
meaningful reserve, who has failed to ensure cover and concealment at the front, and,
often, whose troops lack the motivation to fight hard in the defense of those positions. 

Defenders and attackers have varied widely over the last century in their ability to
implement these methods. Deep elastic defenses are complex and difficult to manage.
And the kinds of combined arms techniques needed to make even slow headway against
them are at least as hard to execute in the field, especially where air and ground forces
must cooperate closely. Often, the best single predictor of outcomes in real warfare has
thus been the balance of skill and motivation on the two sides. Where both sides can
handle the complexity of modern warfare and use their materiel to full potential, the
result has often been slow, grinding battles of attrition that look more like 1918 than
1940 or 1967. But where defenders, in particular, lack the skills or the motivation to
master complex modern warfare and present shallow, forward, ill-prepared or poorly
motivated defenses, then astutely-led, well-trained attackers have been able to exploit
defenders’ failings and produce lightning victories — whether in 1940 or in 1967 or in
1991. 

The contours of combat so far in Ukraine give little reason to expect some coming
transformation of this pattern. Rapid early ground gains against shallow, forward
defenses followed by successful counterattacks against overextended attackers are far
more similar to the past than different from it — nor is subsequent offensive frustration
against deeper, better prepared defenses a radical break from historical experience. Of
course there is a range of new equipment in Ukraine, from drones to anti-tank guided
missiles to long-range surface-to-air missiles and more. But every war brings new
equipment. And most wars bring claims that this new equipment is revolutionizing
warfare to radically favor attackers or defenders — certainly this was a major feature of
the debates following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the 2001
invasion of Afghanistan, or the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. For Ukraine so far,
neither the fighting nor the debate over the fighting has posed any radical departure
from these tendencies. 

Long Live Offensive Maneuver 

What, then, does this mean for the U.S. military looking forward? Part II of this series
considers this in more detail, but several broad, tentative lessons are worth highlighting
first. 

First, offensive maneuver is apparently far from dead. Even in the face of modern
weapons, breakthrough is still possible, and especially so when astute offensive
operations on interior lines pose dilemmas for thinly stretched defenses like those of the
Russians in Kherson and Kharkiv since mid-summer. Those offensives would have
been even more successful with improved Ukrainian training and equipment, but
Ukraine’s ability to succeed with what they have is a powerful demonstration that
offensive maneuver has not been rendered impossible by new technology. 

But second, while offensive breakthrough is still possible under the right conditions, it
remains very hard to accomplish against deep, prepared defenses with adequate supplies
and operational reserves behind them. This is not a novel feature of new technology —
it is an enduring consequence of the post-1900 lethality of ever-evolving weapons that
has been observed repeatedly over more than a century of combat experience. Exposed
defenders are increasingly vulnerable to long-range weapons and sensors, but covered
and concealed positions remain highly resistant to precision engagement. Shallow,
forward defenses can be ruptured with well-organized combined arms attacks, but deep
defenses with meaningful reserves behind them still pose much harder problems for
attackers. Overextended positions without secure supply lines can be overwhelmed, but
consolidated positions with viable logistical support are still much harder and more
costly to overcome. 

Third, neither shallow, vulnerable defenses nor deep, robust ones are universal features
of modern war. Both have occurred regularly since 1900, and both have occurred, at
various times and places, in Ukraine since February. 

And this in turn casts doubt on the advisability of redesigning modern militaries around
an assumption that new technology has made effective offensive maneuver either
impossible or available on demand. Successful offense has long been very difficult, and
it has normally required both demanding preparations and a permissive defender. But it
offers decisive outcomes when conditions allow it, and such conditions recur with
enough frequency to suggest that its demands are worth meeting. 

Stephen Biddle is Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University,

and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Image: Ukrainian Ministry of Defense