Ukraine is not one big war. It's a hundred little wars.

The way the war in Ukraine is covered in the news makes it seem like a singular thing – the attack Russia launched against its neighbor country eight months ago that is still ongoing.  We get reports of missile and drone strikes on cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv; the same kinds of strikes on power plants and other crucial infrastructure; movement of Ukrainian forces near Kherson; the big offensive when Ukraine took back nearly 3,500 square miles of its territory in the northeast which had been lost in the early weeks of the war.

No war is a single thing, a gigantic battle that one side wins and the other loses, or even a series of a few major battles, even if, as has happened so far in Ukraine, the two sides fight each other for nearly a year. 

I make this mistake myself all the time.  Recently, I wrote a column that said British defense officials believe that Russia has suffered 90,000 casualties since the war began.  That is a terrible figure, and it does reflect serious damage to the Russian war effort, but it is not of much use in describing what is going on over there.  Each casualty on either side, Ukraine or Russia, is an individual tragedy for the family that loses a soldier who has died or been seriously wounded, even crippled for life. It's a loss to the unit in which the soldier serves.  It doesn’t take heavy losses in a unit for morale to flag, for the unit’s discipline and cohesion to be damaged enough to render it ineffective as a fighting unit.

This happens because the guys who get killed or wounded are the friends of the soldiers who survive.  The survivors are damaged by the loss of their buddies.  They can begin to lose confidence in their leaders if they come to blame the loss of their friends on incompetence by platoon leaders or company commanders or higher commanders like colonels and generals. 

It's almost unknowably hard for a unit to lose soldiers in combat.  I’ll give you one rather small example from the time I spent with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq in 2003.  I was embedded, as it was said, with a company that held a small base camp in downtown Mosul.  The day I arrived, a two-vehicle convoy had been hit by machinegun fire, killing a sergeant major and his driver, who was a private first class from the company I was with.  It was just two soldiers, but you could feel the strange mix of depression and anger in the air that accompanies such a loss.  The sergeant major was popular with everyone in the battalion.  The PFC from our company was a kid from Illinois who was fond of practical jokes and was really good at the video games the troops played during their downtime.  Everybody liked him.  There was a box containing his personal effects in the hallway just outside the company command center.  Within hours of his death, soldiers had already left notes and cards that would be sent with the man’s effects back to his family in the States.