US Army’s Ability to Maneuver Rapidly on the Battlefield May Be Over

• The days of rapid advances of tanks and infantry deep into enemy territory may be over.
• The U.S. military needs to be more prepared for combat that resembles World War I, an Army veteran says.
• Any advancing force must move with a defensive bubble against enemy firepower, he argued.

Modern weapons have become so precise and deadly that armies will soon no longer be able to quickly maneuver on the battlefield.

Instead, they will trudge forward under the protection of defensive “bubbles” designed to stop drones and missiles. According to this vision, rapid maneuvers on the battlefield will be replaced by fierce wars of attrition where victory will go to the side with the most firepower as well as the most resources to replace losses.

It is a grim vision of war that has more in common with the slaughter of World War I than the mechanized blitzkriegs of World War II and Desert Storm, where infantry and armor supported by air power seized a vast territory. But it’s a future the West must prepare for, warns Alex Vershinin, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, in an essay for the British think tank Royal United Services Institute.

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that – at least for now – firepower dominates maneuver. The Russians and Ukrainians have painfully learned that with surveillance and attack drones constantly overhead, breaking out of cover is dangerous and slow. Long-range guided missiles and shells can decimate armored columns that dare to pass through minefields and layered defenses covered by artillery and air power. Instead of large-scale offensives, the war in Ukraine has become a largely static conflict where immense preparations are made for attacks that could reach an obscure village or a few square kilometers of territory before the attacker stops. to retreat and regroup.

“It is easier to mass fires than forces,” Vershinin said in the RUSI analysis. “Depth maneuvers, which require the bundling of combat power, are no longer possible because any massive force will be destroyed by indirect fire before it can succeed in depth. Instead, a ground offensive requires a protective bubble waterproof to ward off enemy strike systems.

“Shallow attacks along the forward line of troops are more likely to succeed at an acceptable cost ratio; attempts at deep penetration will be exposed to massive fire as soon as they leave the protection of the defensive bubble,” Vershinin said.

This mobile shield would be made up of layers of defense systems, including air defense against drones and missiles, as well as electronic warfare to jam these drones and missiles by flooding their monitoring frequencies with electronic noise. But this protection comes at the cost of rapid maneuvering. This bubble must be carefully implemented to provide interconnected coverage against multiple types of threats and evolve in sync with the column.

“Moving many interdependent systems is very complicated and unlikely to be successful,” Vershinin said.

Coordinating all these different weapons and jammers also requires skilled personnel that even advanced armies may lack. “Integrating these overlapping assets requires centralized planning and exceptionally well-trained staff officers who can integrate multiple capabilities on the fly,” Vershinin said. “It takes years to train such officers, and even combat experience does not allow such skills to be acquired in a short time.”

As an example, Vershinin cites a hypothetical advance of a platoon of 30 soldiers. This would require multiple jammers to disrupt enemy drones, guided rockets and communications systems. Engineers will need to navigate their way through minefields and infantry will need to coordinate with friendly artillery and drones. Failure to do so could be catastrophic: Russia now fires 10,000 artillery shells a day, and this year it has already dropped 3,500 large GPS-guided glide bombs that have devastated Ukrainian positions.

“All of these systems have to work as an integrated team just to support 30 men in multiple vehicles attacking another 30 men or less,” Vershinin said. One can only imagine the preparations required for a brigade- or division-scale attack – those necessary to achieve decisive victories on the battlefield.

All this raises a deeper problem, particularly for the West. Without maneuver, war becomes a battle of attrition, like World War I, or a siege war like that of the Union and Confederate armies before Richmond in 1864. This type of war takes place over years and causes large-scale massacres.

“The West is not prepared for this kind of war,” Vershinin said. “For most Western experts, the strategy of attrition is counterintuitive. Historically, the West has preferred the short, ‘winner-takes-all’ confrontation between professional armies.”

To some extent, all wars are attrition: what ultimately destroyed the Third Reich was not a few defeats like those at Stalingrad and Normandy, but the cumulative losses of six years of bitter fighting. However, to maintain a war of attrition, it is necessary to emphasize production, mobilize resources over the long term and be able to continually replace losses. Victory goes to the side that can wear down the enemy while maintaining its own strength.

“The military conduct of war is driven by overall strategic political goals, military realities and economic limitations,” Vershinin said. “Combat operations are superficial and focus on destroying enemy assets, not conquering terrain.”

The question is whether Western audiences will tolerate this mode of warfare. Vladimir Putin and his generals may not lose sleep after suffering nearly 500,000 casualties in two years. But the average American or European may feel differently.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine and other publications. He holds a master’s degree in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter And LinkedIn.