Lessons from Ukraine
By Sergei · 4 March 2025
War in Ukraine: Three Years, Three Lessons
There are certain occasions, mercifully rare, when one becomes acutely aware that a historical turning is underway. One looks at the calendar and takes note of the date: this precise moment will be etched in the historical record. Invariably, these occasions involve an aspect of surreal horror: everyone remembers where they were on 9/11, disturbed and transfixed watching the Twin Towers burn, then collapse. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, had the quality of history narrowly avoided. On that day, a fraction of an inch made all the difference: instead of history turning, the President turned his head.
February 24, 2022, was another historic day. Now widely known as “Z Day” (after the “Z” tactical markings on Russian vehicles), the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War was a watershed moment in world history, bringing high-intensity warfare back to Europe for the first time in generations and signaling the return of great power politics.
This year’s anniversary of the war – the third Z-Day – was the first to occur under the new Trump administration and was marked for many with optimism that the new US President could make headway towards a negotiated settlement to end the war. Whereas the Biden Administration was content to continue to funnel weapons and funds into Ukraine indefinitely, President Trump has repeatedly stated his wish to bring the war to an end. The shift in America’s stance was dramatically illustrated last week when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was unceremoniously booted from the White House following a meltdown in the Oval Office.
As the world awaits the next act, it is worth taking stock of the story so far and considering what has been learned from it. Three lessons, from three years of war, can be drawn.
1. Big War is Back
When the American Civil War began in 1861, both sides shared a sense of complacency. Both Confederates and Union men thought that the affair would be settled quickly in their favor. President Lincoln put out a call for a mere 75,000 volunteers to enlist for a period of just three months. Confederate recruitments were of similarly short duration. One man saw things differently. “You might as well attempt to put out the flames of a burning house with a squirt-gun,” wrote William Tecumseh Sherman of Lincoln’s recruitment drive. “I think it is to be a long war – very long – much longer than any politician thinks.”
Sherman was right, of course. By the end of the war four years later, 700,000 Americans were dead. The story is far from unique. History is full of wars that started with the anticipation of a quick victory, only to devolve into an interminable slaughter, leaving behind scarred, frightened, and exhausted survivors.
Wars are easy to start but often difficult to finish, and combatants tend to get more than they bargained for. Humanity has relearned this lesson in Ukraine. Furthermore, despite the presence of sophisticated weapons systems and precision strike capabilities, warfare seems to have returned to a form that resembles the twentieth-century world wars, with a massive industrial base feeding gigantic armies. We are no longer in the age of the surgical strikes. Ukraine and Russia have fought a sprawling, gruelling, bloody conflict over thousands of miles of contested territory. The lesson is clear: Big War is back.
The amount of materiel that has been used in Ukraine is staggering. On the eve of the war, the Ukrainian Army was the largest and best-equipped in Europe. Ukrainian tank and howitzer parks were the 2nd largest in Europe, lagging only the Russians. Since then, Ukraine’s Western patrons have delivered more than 7,100 armored vehicles, along with 6,000 unarmored Infantry Mobility Vehicles like Humvees: more armored vehicles than the Wehrmacht used in Operation Barbarossa: that is, the largest and most devastating campaign in history.
The enormous scale of the Russia-Ukraine conflict isn’t limited to armored vehicles but extends into munitions and strike systems. The most demanded item of the war is the howitzer shell. At the beginning of the conflict, Russian forces were firing 60,000 shells per day. Although this number has declined with the exhaustion of reserves and the limitations imposed by the rate of production, Russia is still firing around 10,000 shells per day. Before the war, American shell production was 14,000 shells per month. Even with efforts underway to raise this to 100,000 shells monthly, there remains a yawning void between output and the expenditure observed in Ukraine.
US-backed forces might expect to use air power as a partial substitute for ground-based howitzers and rocketry, but the math here is similarly discouraging. In August of 2024, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense tallied a total of 9,590 missiles and 14,000 drones launched by Russia since the start of the war. By comparison, American production of the venerable Tomahawk missile sputters along at around 100 per year. The Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff missile shows better numbers at a rate of 550 each year, but this is still far short of Russian totals. The reality is that American missile production is insufficient to cover current usage, even without the prospect of a major future war.
Production of American air defense interceptors also lags far behind expenditure rates in Ukraine. The PAC-3 missile utilized by the famous Patriot air defense system is produced at a rate of 230 per year: enough to load about seven Patriot batteries with a single salvo each.
The scale of the Russian air campaign has pushed the Ukrainian air defense network to the limit, and this is no mean feat. Ukraine began the war with the densest air defense network of any state in Europe. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Ukraine inherited the equivalent of an entire Soviet air defense district, including hundreds of launchers. To exhaust this defense, despite the backstops provided by dozens of western-donated systems, was a huge task.
Discussions of the production numbers of various military systems can easily degenerate into the autism of an endless parade of acronyms: PAC-3 interceptors, or JASSMs, or ATACMs, or the other systems in play here. The main point is the issue of scale. Usually, American-made systems are at least marginally better than Russian equivalents, but the war in Ukraine has been primarily a question of capacity at scale. Both Russia and Ukraine have mobilized millions of men and coordinated an enormous output of shells, missiles, vehicles, and other materiel for three exhausting years.
Ukrainian artillerymen fire an M777 howitzer toward Russian positions on the front line of eastern Ukraine, amid the Russian invasion of the country. (November 23, 2022)
Ukrainian artillerymen fire an M777 howitzer toward Russian positions on the front line of eastern Ukraine, amid the Russian invasion of the country. (November 23, 2022)
The scale of the Ukraine War emphasizes the role that the United States would be compelled to play in any comparable ground war. Ukraine currently has more than 75 brigades in the line. The French Army, on balance the best among America’s NATO allies, maintains just eight combat brigades under its Land Forces Command. The contributions of ancillary NATO members (Denmark, Estonia, etc) would be negligible. In a continental war, the United States would do the heavy lifting, rendering debates about NATO’s military spending goals trite.
In an era of Big War, 2% of, e.g. Latvia’s GDP, means very little. Big War requires the capacity to mobilize personnel and industry at a scale that Western states are ill-prepared for and Western populations would find shocking. This raises an ominous question. For many decades, the American public has inhabited a world where war is a remote abstraction. Even the war in Vietnam, although socially disruptive, did not drastically impact the daily rhythm of life in America, and Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were even less consequential. Big War, however, promises something different: widespread mobilization, potential privation, and significant casualties.
Western military institutions are not oblivious to this prospect. For example, a 2023 paper published by the US Army War College warned that a high-intensity ground war along the lines of the current conflict in Ukraine could cost the United States a sustained burn rate of up to 3,600 casualties per day. By comparison, American casualties in two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan came to around 50,000 in total. The paper concluded that American manpower, already constrained by a dwindling Individual Ready Reserve and flagging recruitment, is currently not prepared for this kind of conflict, and that large-scale ground operations would force the United States to adopt partial conscription.
This kind of analysis is sobering but also refreshing: it is good that some people at least are paying attention. But it is not clear that either American politicians or the American public have absorbed its meaning. It is easy to mobilize public sentiment against Russia, that familiar enemy of Cold War nostalgia, but generating excitement for thousands of daily casualties and the return of conscription is different.
In the end, the best way to win in an era of Big War is probably to avoid war altogether.
2. The Battlefield is Empty
Humanity’s history of organized violence began in a region that is still marked by violence: the border between modern Lebanon and Syria, where the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II fought a major battle against the Hittite Empire in 1274 BC. The Battle of Kadesh, named after a nearby ancient city, is famous as the first battle in history for which detailed information about tactical maneuvers is known, courtesy of a variety of Egyptian wall reliefs, texts, and inscriptions.
At Kadesh and for most of the next 3,300 years, old armies generally fought each other by standing up straight and marching toward each other in the open. From Greek phalanxes through the Roman legions, all the way to grenadiers, armies made their presence unmistakable with bright regalia and standards. Neither the Greek hoplite, with his shining bronze armor and horsehair plume, nor the British Red Coat with his bright scarlet uniform, tried to conceal themselves from the enemy.
By the middle of the 19th Century, this tactic was beginning to change. Armies during the American Civil War made use of trenches and earthworks to protect themselves from withering gunfire. At the end of the century, the Boer Wars demonstrated that rifled firearms could do immense damage to infantry in the open. Finally, World War I, which combined rifle fire, machine guns, and howitzer shells, sent everyone scrambling for cover.
Essentially, the history of warfare can be divided into two distinct epochs. The first epoch, which lasted from the Battle of Kadesh to the Siege of Vicksburg (3,137 years), was an epoch of armies that stood up straight in formation. The second epoch, our current epoch, is the epoch of the empty battlefield in which soldiers spend most of their time trying to conceal themselves from the enemy.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that the era of the empty battlefield is intensifying. The most powerful coefficient on the battlefield today is the nexus of modern ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) and precision strike systems. This power is brought to bear through drones of all types – spotter drones surveilling the battlefield and strike drones which include First Person View (FPV) units. The ability of both Ukrainian and Russian forces to survey and strike the battlefield is so precise that they can find and hit enemy vehicles and positions at particular points of vulnerability: footage of FPV drones flying through doorways and windows of enemy strongpoints is now everywhere.
On modern battlefields, hiding is now a critical skill. Anything (or anyone) that can be seen can be hit and destroyed. Blanketing electronic warfare, which can deny airspace to enemy drones, remains far away, and until it arrives, the ability to win decisive victories has become very difficult. Armies are forced to disperse and conceal themselves to avoid enemy surveillance and strike systems and, therefore, find it difficult to gain momentum. This reality was witnessed early in the war through Ukraine’s successes in using American rocket systems to strike Russian ammunition dumps – in response, Russia dispersed and concealed its supply depots. Dispersion has also now taken place with manpower and vehicles – despite the large numbers of personnel mobilized on both sides, assault actions are regularly conducted by relatively small groups (often company-sized or smaller) as these are the only forces that can be safely organized to attack.
A soldier of the special aerial reconnaissance unit of the National Police of Ukraine Khyzhak holds an FPV drone in his hand during hostilities, Donetsk region, Ukraine. (December 14, 2024)
A soldier of the special aerial reconnaissance unit of the National Police of Ukraine Khyzhak holds an FPV drone in his hand during hostilities, Donetsk region, Ukraine. (December 14, 2024)
Until new technology can provide a way to reliably disrupt drones, battlefields will continue to empty. As military AI and algorithmic target selection procedures expand, it will no longer be enough to hide visually, in fortifications and under camouflage – it will also become important to disperse troops in a way that can confuse surveillance algorithms. The soldiers of the future can expect to spend most of their time hiding. As a result, wars in the future are likely to be more attritional and less decisive than the wars that Western publics have grown used to. Modern surveillance and strike systems make it difficult and costly to maneuver on the battlefield. This was comprehensively demonstrated in 2023 when a Ukrainian counteroffensive that was equipped, planned, and trained by NATO ended in catastrophic failure.
The American public would like its wars to resemble 1991’s Desert Storm, which was decisively won in a matter of weeks with fewer than 300 casualties. It’s relatively easy to mobilize public support for wars like this, which are short, decisive, and relatively bloodless. It’s much harder to generate support for something that more approximates the First World War. As the Vietnam War showed, the American public is likely to quickly grow weary of a grinding slugfest halfway across the world.
Big War in the 21st Century will probably also be Slow War, and the public won’t like it one bit.
3. Spheres of Influence Are Real
One of the great paradoxes of the contemporary world is the self-concealing nature of American power. The United States was dominant in the world for three decades following the fall of the USSR; one of the effects of this power has been success at cloaking itself in a consensus-driven internationalism.
America’s wars in the Middle East are an example. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, featured a “coalition of the willing,” which nominally included countries like Estonia, Iceland, Honduras, and Slovakia. While the military contributions of such states are negligible, their participation was essential to disguising America’s ability and willingness to act unilaterally.
Fundamentally, while American might was unchallenged, American foreign policy was always careful to avoid endorsing the idea that ‘might makes right’. Indeed, performatively shunning a kinetic, power-based world has been a foundational brick in the current world order. Even though America’s colossal power animated the entire system, the world formally disavowed the classical theory of geopolitics that recognized state power at its center.
Together with the formal rejection of state power as the currency of world affairs, paradoxically made possible only by the state power of the United States, came the rejection of ideas like “spheres of influence” – the principle that powerful states naturally attain the right to influence affairs in their weaker neighbors. The idea of spheres of influence is foundational to international politics: it is embodied in American history by the Monroe Doctrine.
Today, an ascendent faction in American foreign policy seeks a return to this principle and reorient towards a “hemispheric” foreign policy focused on securing dominance in the Americas by cowing Canada into submission and acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal. And no wonder. What the war in Ukraine has shown is that spheres of influence are real – not just as an abstract construct in a theory of geopolitics, but as a concrete manifestation of geography. The issue is not whether a power like Russia, China, or the United States “deserves” to have preponderant influence over its neighbors. It is more like a question of physics.
Take logistics. Ukraine and Russia were both former Republics of the USSR, with an integrated rail and road network designed to sustain an integrated economic unit. Soviet leadership never imagined that this integrated whole could be fractured. Seen from this angle, early war expectations that Russia would struggle to logistically sustain a war in Ukraine never made sense: Russia was fighting on a dense rail network designed to move vast freight in and out of eastern Ukraine, to a frontline actually closer to Russia’s Southern Military District HQ in Rostov than to Kiev.
Ukraine shows the need to return to classical thinking about spheres of influence, not as a legal or an ethical question, but as a dimension of power with military implications. Powerful states are like heavenly bodies with a gravitational field. The war in Ukraine took place right in the belly of Russian power. Despite the much larger economies of Ukraine’s Western backers, it was mostly Ukrainian forces that suffered widespread shortages of shells and vehicles. This is not to imply that the Russian economy has borne the burden of the war effortlessly, but it has more than held its own.
A 19th-century statesman would never have batted an eye at the idea that Russia could more easily sustain a war in its own imperial backyard than a distant Western power, notwithstanding relatively greater Western wealth, and they would have been right not to do so. This has important implications for the Western alliance because possible future theaters of war lie directly on the dermis of their rivals. Taiwan, for example, is barely 100 miles off the coast of Fujian, a Chinese province with a larger population than California. Debating whether the Chinese can match the US Navy misses the point. What will matter, more than anything, is where the game is played. China’s inability to project power against America’s west coast has little bearing on its potential to sustain a war directly off its own coastline, since, as the Russians have shown in Ukraine, even a relatively poor power can accrue significant advantages from fighting right in its own backyard.
The Ukraine War is now at a turning point, with Ukraine’s Western backers divided on the prospect of indefinitely supporting a flailing effort. Whether the Trump Administration will succeed in achieving a peace deal remains to be seen, but it’s clear that Trump’s enthusiasm for the Ukrainian war project is much less than his predecessor’s.
Knowing what type of war you are signing up for is paramount. It is doubtful whether Europe would have rushed to war in 1914 if they could have foreseen the reality of the Western Front. Ukraine intimates that future wars will be industrial, mass casualty affairs, characterized by agonizingly slow process and the mass consumption of both human biomass and industrial material. The War in Ukraine has been much larger, more expensive, and less decisive than Americans are used to and has shown that the military value of American wealth, power, and technological sophistication are limited. It should be taken as an opportunity to learn important lessons in order to avoid still worse disasters.
