‘Column Of Tanks Is Destroyed In Three Minutes’: Revolution On Battlefield In Ukraine

The WSJ is telling about the new tactics of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The technological revolution on the battlefield in Ukraine has significantly changed modern warfare: drones and other surveillance systems make it impossible to use the tactics that Ukraine’s Western partners were accustomed to and which the Ukrainian Armed Forces expected to use in a counteroffensive.

The American Wall Street Journal writes about this in its material.

“With thousands of Ukrainian and Russian drones in the air along the front line at a given time, from cheap quadrocopters to long-range winged aircraft that can fly hundreds of miles and stay on target for hours, the very nature of war has transformed.

The drones are just one element of change. New integrated battle-management systems that provide imaging and locations in real time all the way down to the platoon and squad levels—in Ukraine’s case, via the Starlink satellite network—have made targeting near instantaneous.

“Today, a column of tanks or a column of advancing troops can be discovered in three to five minutes and hit in another three minutes. The survivability on the move is no more than 10 minutes,” said Major General Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy commander of Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence service. “Surprises have become very difficult to achieve.”

“The technological revolution triggered by the Ukraine war, Europe’s biggest conflict in nearly eight decades, is calling into question the feasibility of some of the basic concepts of American military doctrine,” the publication notes.

Combined-arms maneuvers using large groups of armored vehicles and tanks to make rapid breakthroughs — something that Washington and its allies had expected the Ukrainian offensive this summer to achieve — may no longer be possible in principle, some soldiers here say. The inevitable implication, according to Ukrainian commanders, is that the conflict won’t end soon.

Such changes are only now being gradually recognized by Western experts, as evidenced by comments in the WSJ article. “The days of massed armored assaults, taking many kilometers of ground at a time, like we did in 2003 in Iraq — that stuff is gone because the drones have become so effective now,” said retired U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Bradley Crawford, an Iraq war veteran who is now training Ukrainian forces near Bakhmut in a private capacity.

One of the advantages of using drones is their relative cheapness. For instance, each FPV drone, a type of weapon that entered widespread use this summer, costs a fraction of a regular 155mm artillery shell, which is worth some $3,000, let alone main battle tanks priced at millions of dollars.

Yet the drones now have the precision and speed to catch up with any moving armored vehicle and, if piloted expertly, can disable even the most modern tanks and howitzers. Their cheapness also means that they can be used against any target of opportunity, including cars and small groups of soldiers, emptying out the roads within several miles of the front line.

“Before we started flying here, the Russians had so much movement that there were traffic jams in Bakhmut,” said the pilot, a member of the Special Operations Center “A” of the Security Service of Ukraine. “Now, all the roads in Bakhmut are empty.”

WSJ journalists had the opportunity to observe the work of these drone operators stationed near Chasiv Yar: right in their eyes, a Ukrainian drone blew up a pickup truck full of Russian military personnel.

Center “A” is one of many Ukrainian forces operating FPV drones. Since June 1, the center’s FPV crews in eastern and southern Ukraine have hit 113 Russian tanks, 111 fighting vehicles and 68 artillery systems, causing nearly 700 Russian casualties, according to the unit.

The Russians, too, have formidable — and fast-improving — drone capabilities of their own. Minutes after the Center “A” team tried to establish a position in the Chasiv Yar high-rise, it was spotted by a Russian drone and the building was targeted by mortar fire. The Ukrainian troopers quickly ran from the building and then filtered back in groups of two, at long intervals.

Compared to early 2022, Russia is quickly catching up and sometimes surpassing Ukraine's drone capabilities. Moreover, Ukrainian commanders say, many UAVs that were effective just a few months ago have quickly become outdated and now need to be redesigned to overcome enemy interference.

In June, as Ukraine kicked off its counteroffensive, every time its forces gathered more than a few tanks and infantry fighting vehicles together, their columns were quickly spotted by ubiquitous Russian drones and then targeted by a combination of artillery, missiles fired from choppers and swarms of drones. Minefields channeled these columns into kill zones.

The Russian military faced the same fate when it gathered a large tank force of its own in an attempt to push into the city of Vuhledar in January, and in subsequent smaller attempts at armored offensives. Noticed by Ukrainians from the air, these columns were also swiftly destroyed.

After initial heavy losses of Western-supplied tanks and fighting vehicles, Ukrainian troops have now switched to operating in small groups that are ferried toward the front line using armored personnel carriers, and then attempt to advance one tree line after another.

“Unfortunately, most of our offensive is now on foot,” said Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, the commander of HUR. “You could see a mirror picture last fall, when the Russians were carrying out their own offensive, above all in Bakhmut. The same way, the use of heavy armor was minimal, everyone was waging war on foot. I don’t think anything will be different now.”

The bloody war fought by Ukraine is the kind of conflict that the U.S. military hasn’t experienced since Korea in the 1950s, WSJ states. Modern Western military training and defense procurement have been shaped by decades of counterinsurgency operations against much weaker opponents in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. That has led to a focus on costly and sophisticated weapons systems that don’t survive long in a full-scale conflict with a comparable adversary.

“A lot of Western armor doesn’t work here because it had been created not for an all-out war but for conflicts of low or medium intensity. If you throw it into a mass offensive, it just doesn’t perform,” said Taras Chmut, director of Come Back Alive, a foundation that raises money to provide Ukrainian units with drones, vehicles and weapons. Even the most expensive tanks have proved vulnerable to ancient land mines, after all.

The corollary, he added, is that the focus should be on providing front-line troops with a larger quantity of cheaper, simpler systems. That is a historical lesson that harks back to World War II, when the Soviet T-34 and American-built Sherman tanks were significantly inferior to German Tigers and Panthers but could be mass-produced, fielded in much greater numbers and more easily repaired in the field.

Western military planners are taking notice. “We have a lot of lessons to learn. One is that quantity is a quality of its own,” said Major General Christian Freuding, the head of Ukraine operations at the German Ministry of Defense. “You need numbers, you need force numbers. In the West we have reduced our military, we have reduced our stocks. But quantity matters, mass matters.”

When it comes to tanks, in particular, the lesson of the Russian war in Ukraine is that tank-on-tank battles have become a rarity — which means that the relative sophistication of a tank is no longer as important. Fewer than 5% of tanks destroyed since the war began had been hit by other tanks, according to Ukrainian officials, with the rest succumbing to mines, artillery, antitank missiles and drones.