It has been a while since I last posted an update and while much has change in Ukraine, much has also stayed the same.

The front lines remain relatively static.  This reflects the Ukrainian ability to adapt and the Russian refusal to do so.  The Russians are fast approaching a casualty crisis in their reliance on what are essentially tweaked mass assault tactics that crumble in the face of Ukrainian physical and drone defenses.  Monthly Russian casualties are reportedly in the 30k-40k a month in dead and wounded.[1]  These are casualty rates that cannot be sustained.  Since neither side is reporting casualties in anything like a reliable manner this is just conjecture.  The lack of maneuver and/or breakthrough by either side since the fall of 2022 is telling, however.

There are several lessons learned coming out of Ukraine, lessons that I am not certain the US, in particular, is learning.  In order, but not necessarily in order of importance they are:

  1. Drones are the masters of the battlefield at the tactical and increasingly useful at the strategic level. Competition in this domain for dominance between Ukraine and Russia is fierce
  2. Modern war is even less about the big battalions than many analysts thought and even still think
  3. This one needed to be relearned, Alliances are not a system to base defense on. Allies can and will be unreliable if not outright adversarial
  4. Starlink, and access to that network, has changed the communications paradigm down to the tactical level in the face of tactical and even operational jamming effectiveness of traditional military comms in the battle zone
  5. The unimportance, even useless ness of massed armor as a means to achieve breakthrough

These lessons bring up several questions about what to do.  Questions that apparently no one has the answers to and bear some serious thinking on.  That is what I am going to be doing over the next several weeks.  Putting some thought into these issues and contemplating possible solutions.

[1] Seth G. Jones and Riley McCabe, Russian Blood and Treasure: The Ballooning Costs of Putin’s War, July 1, 2026, https://www.csis.org/analysis/russian-blood-and-treasure-ballooning-costs-putins-war.