Ukraine's Strategy of Attrition Gady, Franz-Stefan; Kofman, Michael
Survival (London),
03/2023, Letnik:
65, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Attrition has been both Ukraine's and Russia's primary approach at the tactical level. Ukraine's preferred way of war centres on the use of artillery fire to facilitate decisive attritional effects ...on the opposing force, which it then exploits with manoeuvre. This is not unexpected, as most major conventional wars feature attrition as well as manoeuvre and reconstitution. Western assistance has brought Ukraine to an impressive point, but may not yield a fires advantage for Ukraine sufficient to ensure further operational breakthroughs or strategic gains. Advanced Western weapons, such as the US-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), have not allowed Ukraine to avoid attritional combat, particularly in its counter-offensive in Kherson. Even with more effective wide-scale combined-arms training and precision strikes, as contemplated, future Ukrainian gains are likely to be incremental and costly unless the Russian military significantly misspends combat power in its own offensive operations.
The US military has developed a persistent 'German problem' due to the outsize influence of legendary strategist John Boyd. In a cautionary tale of how poor military history can lead to real-world ...mistakes, Stephen Robinson, in his book The Blind Strategist, demonstrates that, by basing his ideas on the tendentious work of historian B.H. Liddell Hart in collaboration with a coterie of former Wehrmacht officers, Boyd ingrained in the US military a culture of strategic thinking focused on achieving tactical and operational success through 'manoeuvre warfare' at the expense of a coherent war-winning strategy. Although Robinson overstates his case in certain areas, he convincingly demonstrates that Boyd's thinking continues to affect the US military in ways that could prove damaging in future wars, particularly against peer adversaries.
DYNAMIC SPACE OPERATIONS Shaw, John E.; Bourque, Daniel R.; Shaw, Marcus
Æther: A Journal of Strategic Airpower & Spacepower,
12/2023, Letnik:
2
Journal Article
As in the battlespace on Earth, the force capable of sustaining maneuver in space will have the advantage. This maneuver, however, will require a scale previously unknown to a domain thus far ...dominated by Keplerian and Newtonian thought. The paradigm of positional space operations must be replaced by a paradigm of dynamic space operations, where spaceborne combat forces are no longer static and predictable.
The purpose of this study is to form a model on effective tactics. We selected five theorists, three of which also provided support from quantitative analysis on winning battles. The theorists all ...advocate the use of maneuver warfare, developed from the German WWII-approach. The analysis indicates the importance of accomplishing a sequence in battle of surprise attacks, followed by shock action, and prompt exploitation in order to accomplish an organizational breakdown of enemy force. Tactical defeat is foremost a result of psychological reactions by the enemy rather than from physical destruction by superior material resources at the point of assault.
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