Ukraine struggles to press its offensive against Russian forces. Too much emphasis has been placed on modern Western armored vehicles such as the Leopard 2, Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, and the M1A2 Abrams tank.
No one has put adequate emphasis on airpower and tipping the balance in Ukraine’s favor. Instead of pinprick attacks using Storm Shadow missiles and HIMARS that do little to change the landscape on the battlefield, giving Ukraine air supremacy must be the objective.
Giving the Ukrainians the ability to eliminate Russian defenses from the air in conjunction with ground forces should be a key objective.
The United States and its allies need to provide the Ukrainian forces with close-in air support in the form of AH-64 Apache helicopters, Italian Mangusta, Eurocopter Tiger, and other assault platforms. The A-10 will be retired in the coming years due to aging airframes. Congress should consider selling Ukraine A-10s, and the United States should train Ukrainian pilots to fly the A-10s and use them to blow holes through Russian lines.
Current Ukrainian tactics will not give them the ability to kick the Russians off their soil.
Lessons for Ukraine are direct and immediate. Russian forces are heavily dug in along their front lines in fortified positions such that Ukrainian forces have great difficulty in breaching the fortifications.
Soviet-Era Tactics
Tactics employed by both sides in Ukraine focus around Soviet-era tactics that emphasize the primacy of artillery strikes to support advancing armor and infantry. The Ukrainian army will continue to fail on the battlefield as long as it continues using Soviet tactics that were discredited decades ago.Sure, Ukraine has 40,000 Western-trained soldiers; however, if they’re deployed using failed tactics, they will go nowhere. Defense One notes that the Ukrainian army has baked in Soviet tactics at the corps level. This means the Ukrainians, like their Russian enemies, are top-heavy and don’t give adequate emphasis on lower-level initiative or airpower.
American advisers want to help the Ukrainians transition to a decentralized way of doing things that emphasizes greater initiative among officers at more junior grades.
“The soldiers instead taught themselves how to work as sappers, but couldn’t get certified by the military because the training wasn’t official, he said. Several Ukrainian soldiers Reno spoke with complained that individuals who did complete official courses would be certified, but not actually competent in their assigned specialties.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should demand the resignation of every general who was brought up in the Soviet system.
Need for Air Superiority
Hype that Ukraine will magically kick the Russians out of its occupied territory without airpower and the ability to airdrop soldiers behind Russian lines is silliness. Since 1939 no army has been kicked out of defensive positions without the attacking army first gaining air superiority.Ukrainian propagandists say it took over a month to breakout out from the Normandy beachhead in 1944, but they forget that the Allies gained air superiority over the Germans before that happened.
Ukraine will not be successful until adequate attention is placed on reforming Ukraine’s military and on increasing the offensive role of Ukrainian airpower against Russia. This means giving the Ukrainians more modern close-air support in the form of tank killers like the A-10 and Apache and the ability to take down Russian air defenses. The A-10 is in a league of its own that Ukraine’s Su-25s can’t match.
A look at the 1991 Persian Gulf War shows that coalition forces faced a similarly dug-in Iraqi army that deployed many of the same equipment that the Russian occupation forces in Ukraine. Coalition forces gained air supremacy over the Iraqis that Ukraine simply doesn’t have over its Russian foes.
Get air superiority and give the Ukrainians the ability to put thousands of airborne troops behind Russian lines to hit them from behind.
Ukraine will not win without a serious revamping of its force structure and strategy. History shows that only airpower can throw out an entrenched defender. The faster Ukraine gets air superiority, the sooner it will be until the war ends.