An often remarked aspect of the War in Ukraine has been how much the battlefield looks like World War 1. Trenches and mines have been revealed to be very effective just as they have always been. They are effective not because they can’t be beat, but because the cost of beating them is all out of proportion to the cost of making them. It cost next to nothing dig a trench or make a mine, but to defeat a trench or remove a mine is a very expensive deal.
From what I can tell, short range consumer grade drones have only reinforced that logic. I think this is because the attackers have to move away from their electronic warfare assets and towards the enemies electronic warfare assets. Since range impacts how effective electronic warfare is, this means the attacker is moving to a place where his drones are less effective and the enemies drones are more effective. When you add that to the fact that people and equipment on the move are more vulnerable to drone attacks and the defenders advantage is only reinforced.
That is why I don’t think all the talk about short range drones changing warfare is really correct. It has been a truism in military thought that the defenders have the advantage since at least von Clausewitz wrote “On War”. All short range consumer type drones are doing is reinforcing something about war that we all take for granted. The defender has an advantage.
But all the talk about stalemate and how World War 1 has come again has obscured the big change in warfare that has made it so that the attacker has the clear advantage.
And that big change is long range precise attacks regardless if those attacks are ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, or long range kamikaze drones.
The problem with long range precision attacks is that they flips the logic that the defender has the advantage on its head. As has been shown in Ukraine, Israel, and the Red Sea, it is possible to shoot down long range fires just as it is possible to defeat trenches and mines. The problem is that it is the defender that has to bare the extreme costs and not the attacker. This is a very new problem for the world to face and I don’t think anyone has a good handle on how this is going to play out.
To understand why this is a new problem, we have to go back to Word War II. It was in this war that the Nazis invented both ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. Adolf Hitler deluded himself that these weapons would win him the war but his dreams were ahead of what the technology of the time would support. The problem with these wonder weapons (at least from the Nazi perspective) is the value of what they destroyed was typically less then what it cost to make the weapons. Great Britain might not be able to stop the attacks on London from these wonder weapons, but typically all they wound up doing was blowing up a few houses that cost less then it cost Germany to make the weapon. This was because while Germany had the long range part, they did not have any kind of precision and so had to aim for a target the size of London and hope for the best. The end result was that with every one of these wonder weapons that Germany fired off, Germany was in effect damaging itself more than the Allies in the attritional logic of industrial warfare.
But fast forward to today. The same types of weapons are being used but now computing power has gotten so cheap that even a third rate power like Iran can make long range missiles/drones that have a reasonable chance of a hitting a 100 million dollar power plant. A great power like the US can make missiles that will effectively shoot down those missiles that a nation like Iran can make. The problem is that Iran will spend maybe 1 million on a missile that can effectively target a power plant where as the US will spend 5 million on the missiles needed to shoot down the Iranian missile. Iran has the attritional advantage regardless of whether it ever hits. And if it manages to get through to the 100 million dollar power plant, the pay off gets even better.
Given current technology, I don’t see how this logic changes. It seems to me that it is always going to be cheaper to make something that hit something as large as a power plant then it is going to be to make something that can hit something flying towards that power plant. And yet, the defender can’t afford for that power plant to be hit and so must spend the cost to defend it. If that was a onetime deal, it would not be so bad, but in an industrial war, the attacker can fire at the power plant over and over again. If you have two combatants that are anywhere in the same league, the one who attacks over and over again will grind the other one right down for the same reasons that trench warfare grinds down the attacker in the warfare we are all use to.
This seems to be the strategy that Russia is leaning towards. They have felt firsthand what it is like to be the receiving end of these attacks from the limited amount of long range weapons that have been given to Ukraine. They can also do the math and see how much the interceptor missiles that Ukraine is firing cost. As a result, they are doing everything they can to increase their own production and also going hat in hand to anyone who will sell them long range weapons. Logically, this is going to grind Ukraine down long term regardless of the support they get and nobody of importance seems to be willing to spell out the logic of this problem.
The obvious answer is to go on the attack yourself but that is not always an easy answer as the problems in the Red Sea show. Iran is using Houthi to draw the US into a conflict in the mountains of Yemen. Nobody in the US thinks that would be a good place to have a fight but they don’t want to cede control of the Red Sea to the Houthi/Iran. Some people say that the answer is to ignore the Houthi and go after the Iran. But these people don’t understand full extent of the problems posed by the advantages that long range precision fires give to the attacker.
Iran can likely do very little to stop whatever long range fires that the US wants to fire Iran’s way. But the US would be hard pressed to keep the oil tankers safe in the Persian Gulf. Iran would likely retain drones and cruise missiles able to attack those tankers long after most of the high value targets in Iran were destroyed (look at the problems Israel face stopping Hamas from firing missiles). Thus, any serious attack on Iran would turn into a contest of who could take the most pain. The US from a huge spike in the cost of oil or Iran from all the attacks the US could bring.
But the problem that Iran presents is almost easy to solve compare to the problem that Russia poses. The West can either watch as Ukraine is ground down under a barrage of long range attacks or they can give the Ukraine enough long range attacks that they can bring the fight to the Russia and drag them down. The West can easily give the long range tools to Ukraine to cause Russia a lot of pain but then they have to worry about Russia going to nukes. It is tempting to say the easy answer is to give up on Ukraine. But just like those who think attacking Iran is an easy answer, this ignores the nature of the problem.
If Russia proves that you can defeat the West with sustained long range fires, who is going to want to try it next?