THE ILLUSION OF CONVENTIONAL WAR: EUROPE IS LEARNING THE WRONG LESSONS FROM THE CONFLICT IN UKRAINE
Sandor Fabian | 04.23.24
The Illusion of Conventional War: Europe Is Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Conflict in Ukraine
For more than two years, Western observers have produced a seemingly infinite number of articles and reports trying to derive key lessons from the war in Ukraine and predict their implications for the future of warfare. Beyond the obvious but too often ignored fact that this war is a single and very unique case, drawing meaningful lessons has been further complicated by the fact that most of these studies suffer from confirmation bias due to their authors’ inability to abandon their Western, Clausewitzian analytical lenses and their apparent desire to keep such a theoretical paradigm alive and prove its universal relevance. As a result, important and informative observations have been either ignored or interpreted in completely wrong ways, generating false understanding of the war and leading to meaningless changes in many European countries’ national defense strategies, military doctrine, command and force structures, training and education systems, and equipment acquisition. While many European countries responded to Russia’s invasion by promptly increasing their defense budgets and expediting their acquisition of new equipment, they have largely been applying these increased resources toward the wrong solutions to the security challenge they face. This conflict has confirmed that besides a small number of large European countries such as Poland, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, for most there is no point in building and maintaining more conventional military forces. Contrary to the argument of many experts, the war in Ukraine is evidence of the limited utility of the Western way of war for most European countries.
There have long been reasons, which should have been obvious, that many European countries should not invest in Western-style conventional defense frameworks. Among these are their close proximity to Russian forces, their comparatively small populations, the lack of natural obstacles on their territory, little to no strategic or operational depth to develop a multilayered conventional defense, the lack of history and institutional culture of combined-arms maneuver warfare, limited defense industry production capacity, and their small and insufficiently equipped militaries. But the war in Ukraine makes clearer than ever that these countries should instead develop defensive approaches geared toward fielding formations customized to the unique historical, cultural, geographic, and other features of their operational environments, rationalized for budgetary and manpower considerations, and sustainable with or without the conventional might of any allies and partners. While the Ukraine conflict is indeed very unique, and we must be cautious when trying to apply its lessons elsewhere, there are several observations that are worth close examination by other European countries.
Observation 1: Never present your adversary with a type of war that he is organized, trained, and equipped for.
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/the-illusion-of-conventional-war-europe-is-learning-the-wrong-lessons-from-the-conflict-in-ukraine/
