Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the war of the future. It's not good.

Ukraine air defense intercepts Russian drone over Kyiv (AP photo)

I sure hope the muckety-mucks at the Pentagon are studying the ongoing war in Ukraine closely, because what they’re seeing daily should scare them shitless. Essentially what’s going on is this: conventional warfare, using the conventional weapons of the past and present, is finished. It’s done. Time to take its charred carcass out of the oven and throw it in the trash.

For just a single example, take what happened last week to Russian forces in Ukraine: On a recent single day, the Russian army suffered 2,000 casualties, including losses in the Donetsk region and fighting in Kursk. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported yesterday that the British Ministry of Defense estimates that Russia suffered 45,690 total casualties during the month of November alone. In contrast, it took the U.S. ten years of the war in Vietnam to lose 58,000 dead. The Russian casualty rate, more than 1,500 dead or wounded every day, is not only unsustainable, it is madness.

According to Pentagon sources cited by ISW, the rate of Russian recruitment is estimated to be 25,000 and 30,000 new soldiers per month. That is in the area of 15,000 to 20,000 below replacements necessary to sustain current Russian battlefield strength. When you factor in that Russia is known to be raiding rural villages distant from Moscow and St. Petersburg to fill its recruiting totals, and new recruits are being thrown into the front lines with only a few weeks’ training, the unsustainability of Russia’s war effort becomes even more evident. Russia is also reported by ISW to be “recruiting women for combat and logistics functions.” Russia is at war against a nation, Ukraine, with only a quarter of its population, three percent of its land mass, and nine percent of its Gross Domestic Product, and that nation is killing, on average, 1,500 Russian soldiers, day in and day out.

So, a much, much smaller, poorer, militarily weaker country with far less natural resources and manufacturing capability is basically kicking the shit out of the great big, bad, Russian Bear. What the hell is going on over there?

Try this on for size. The world has been treated to one of the greatest dirty secrets of the last hundred years: Russia’s claimed military might was a paper tiger. Russia has gone up against a country, Ukraine, that has been under-armed, under-supplied, and entirely financially dependent on the U.S. and NATO for nearly three years, and yet Russia has not achieved Putin’s stated goal of making Ukraine part of Russia and has lost hundreds of thousands of his citizens in the process.

Looked at from that perspective, the Russian war effort, despite the fact that they have seized and held one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, has been a spectacular failure.

Why, you ask?

Because fighting a conventional war doesn’t work anymore. Conventional weapons are no longer capable of doing what they were designed to do over the last 75 or so years of their design, manufacture, and deployment.

Let us just take the main battle tank for an example. They are basically missing from the battlefield because they are so easily taken out by much, much cheaper and just as deadly weapons – the American Javelin anti-tank missile being one of them, and the emergence of drones on the battlefield being the other. Drones can search out, identify, and target tanks far more easily than ever before in history. Drones can also be armed with warheads that can destroy tanks. So, a ten-million-dollar tank can be destroyed by a drone carrying a warhead that costs, at most, a couple thousand dollars. Only a country that wants to just walk out in the middle of a field and dump hundreds of millions of dollars in a gigantic pile and then set fire to it would deploy tanks on the battlefield of today in Ukraine or anywhere else for that matter.

The Russian Navy has lost its ability to use its ports in the Black Sea because Ukrainian naval drones can knock out ships in port there. At sea, if Russia was at war with, say, the United States, its ships would be vulnerable to attack by an array of anti-ship missiles, torpedoes, and soon, coming right up in fact, autonomous naval attack drones under the sea.

In the sky, look at the almost complete absence of the Russian air force from the fight in Ukraine, with the exception of brief sorties from inside Russia into airspace close to the Russian border. Anti-aircraft missile technology has become so accurate and so deadly that it makes absolutely no sense for Russia to risk its multi-zillion Ruble jets in attacks on major targets in Ukraine. The same goes for most of the Russian missiles that have been fired at Ukraine over the last two-plus years. When we finally – finally – after months of indecision gave Ukraine Patriot missile batteries and NATO nations did the same with their anti-missile systems, Russian missiles became vulnerable to being shot down by anti-missile weapons that cost far less than the missile being fired by Russia at Ukraine…such as cruise missiles, which cost somewhere between one and two million dollars each.

So, what’s been going on over there in Ukraine? Well, after a whole bunch of dithering by the Pentagon and White House, we finally supplied Ukraine with 155 mm howitzers and HIMARS rocket launchers that carry and shoot six rockets that have a range of about 75 miles. After even more Pentagon and White House stalling and quibbling, we recently gave ATACMS rockets that have a maximum range of about 190 miles. Then we spent months mulling over how Ukraine could use these rockets, at first limiting their use to Russian targets within Ukraine territory, and finally allowing Ukraine to fire the ATACMS into Russian territory at military targets.

Now get this: the ATACMS and HIMARS rockets were developed in the 1980’s and 1990’s. That’s right. These rockets we spent so long deciding to supply Ukraine with and spent even more time deciding on how Ukraine could use them, are technology that is more than 30 years old. The 155 mm howitzer has been in use by the United States army at least since World War II.

Russia has similar weapons that have been in use by their military for exactly the same number of years.

Are you getting the picture here? The war in Ukraine has been fought with weapons that are decades old in design and deployment. We used 155’s in Vietnam. We used less sophisticated rocket launchers in that war, too. We used 155’s and HIMARS and ATACMS rockets in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for all we know, we’ve used them in Syria and in hot spots in Africa and elsewhere, too.

What’s happened in Ukraine is that we have been witness to the obsolescence of these weapons in real time. Drones and satellite-based intelligence and precision guided missiles and computer targeting systems have made the deployment of expensive weapons on the battlefield too dangerous, not only to the troops that must drive and shoot a main battle tank, but to the military budgets of the countries that have those tanks in their arsenals.

Look at what happened when Iran decided it was a good idea to send a couple hundred rockets into Israel this year. Nearly every one of them was shot down by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

Russia has fired so many of its missiles into Ukraine against both military and civilian targets that they have been reduced to launching drone swarm attacks on Ukraine, as they did on Monday, when they sent 110 drones into the air against Ukrainian targets. Ukraine says it shot down 52 drones and 50 were “lost in flight,” according to ABC News. Ukraine has reportedly come up with a counter-drone technology capable of confusing Russian drone guidance systems and sending them off-course back into Russian territory and into Belarus.

ABC News reported yesterday that an “open source intelligence group” in Belarus said that 151 Russian drones entered Belarusian airspace in November. Some of the Russian drones have been redirected by Ukrainian anti-drone technology, and at least one has exploded in Belarus. The Belarus government has even filed a protest with Kyiv and demanded that “comprehensive measures be taken to rule out any such future incidents in the future which could lead to further escalation of the situation in the region.” The Belarus air force reported in September that it has shot down “foreign” drones, according to ABC, not divulging whether the drones were Russian or Ukrainian.

It is now clear where the war in Ukraine is going. Russia has resorted to using human-wave suicide attacks in the eastern Ukraine region of Donetsk in order to overcome Ukrainian defenses. ISW reported yesterday that “Russian forces have thus suffered an estimated 125,800 casualties during a period of intensified offensive operations in September, October, and November 2024 in exchange for 2,356 square kilometers of gains. (Or approximately 53 Russian casualties per square kilometer of Ukrainian territory seized.)”

The Russian strategy is not working. Ukraine has adopted a counter-strategy of falling back slowly from areas in Donetsk that are under Russian attack in such a way as to cause Russia maximum casualties. It works like this: Ukraine retreats a short distance, sets up new lines of defense in pre-prepared areas. Russia advances against these new defenses and takes even more casualties before it happens the same way all over again.

The strategy appears to be working. Ukraine does not release its casualty figures, but they have to be far, far less than Russia’s casualties or Ukraine would have lost the war by now. ISW reported today that Ukraine had advanced in Kursk and in the north of the Kharkiv region, while Russia had advanced around three villages in Donetsk.

What that means is this: Russia is clinging to the territory it holds in Eastern and Southern Ukraine by sacrificing the dead bodies of its soldiers for yards of territory it takes. The strategy seems to be this: Putin wants to hold onto what he’s got and take every square yard he can get, waiting for Trump to take office and engineer some sort of “peace” that will allow Russia to keep everything they have taken from Ukraine.

This is a strategy that doesn’t take into consideration two major points: One, that Ukraine has a say in the outcome of the war, and Two, that the territory Russia has been able to seize over the last two-plus years is barren of towns, villages, farms, and people, and much of it is strewn with mines Russia has laid to hold off Ukrainian counter attacks.

You want to talk about the proverbial cutting off of your nose to spite your face, there it is.

I spoke today with an old friend in Washington who has decades of experience in national security and diplomatic affairs, and he said simply that Ukraine would have won its war against Russia by now if the U.S. and NATO had not been so hesitant and fickle about its support since the war began. Every single weapons system we supplied to Ukraine involved a debate in the Pentagon, State Department, and White House, my friend explained. And that doesn’t even include the debates in the Congress over funding every time the Biden administration asked for money Ukraine was desperate for.

“There was the right-wing mega-isolationists and the anti-war left opposing aid, and in the middle were the Democrats and the struggle for enough old school Republican votes to get aid through the House and the Senate. The far right was more noisy with their opposition. Democrat support was robust and muscular. Europe, especially Germany and France, were skeptical Putin was going to attack until Russian troops crossed the border. They got religion fast. Even Sweden overcame two centuries of neutrality to join NATO along with Finland.”

Putin was able to slow down and limit international support for Ukraine by rattling his nuclear saber every time an escalation in the kinds or amounts of weapons were threatened. According to my Washington friend, who has many friends and contacts in Ukraine and has been involved in conflict resolution for most of his adult life, international support for Ukraine was too little and too late for a Ukrainian victory.

So that’s what happened and at least some of the “why.” But what does the war in Ukraine mean for the future?

Low-cost made-on-the-fly weapons systems like drones have completely upended warfare as we have known it, and we haven’t even seen the introduction of Artificial Intelligence systems into this new weapons landscape yet, except in minor ways. When drones become autonomous, when there are automatic, unmanned artillery and rocket batteries, when air defense systems employ AI along with every modern advance in missile technology they already have, the battlefield of the future will be born, and you won’t want to be there.

Vladimir Putin is showing us right now, today, December 6, 2024 how wars will have to be fought in the future against even a limited deployment of these super-modern weapons like drones and battlefield rocket systems. Putin has had to enlist help from North Korea, and he is throwing human beings in suicide assaults against these defenses and in return, he is achieving gains so limited that Ukraine has given up little pieces of their own land so they can cause Russia increasingly unacceptable losses of life.

War is already a terrible, horrific thing. Ultra-modern AI enabled warfare is going to make it worse. Will conventional war become obsolete? Only if madmen like Putin continue to strut the world stage, baring their chests and forcing their nations to bury hundreds of thousands of their young to feed their egos. If past is prologue, the chances of that are, sadly, 100 percent.