Lesson 1: A small army with a high morale certainly does not stand a chance against an enormous military force.
The Afghan army, which was built up by the US with some 90 billion dollars, collapsed in a short time last year, much to Washington’s astonishment, during the Taliban offensive. Soldiers didn’t feel like fighting. Entire army units, trained by America and Europe, surrendered without a fight. The army, crammed with modern weapons, turned out to be a paper army.
The opposite has happened in Ukraine in recent months. The Ukrainians have shown in the past six months that a small, inventive army with soldiers of high morale can even fight a world power. The support of the population was also of great importance.
“Tens of millions of Ukrainians, with a telephone in hand, showed that the population is also an important means of intelligence,” said retired general Tom Middendorp, who was the highest-ranking Dutch soldier until 2017. Much of what the Russians did was seen and shared by the Ukrainians. This made it easier for the army to take out Russian units.’
‘Combat strength is not only determined by numbers of troops, tanks, etc., but also by the quality of the units and leadership, the tactics and strategy used and morale’, argues Frans Osinga, professor of War Studies at Leiden University and former F-16 pilot. . ‘Russian units appear to have been unprepared for this war, the assumptions were wrong, equipment was not deployed properly in the first months and there was poor preparation: commanders did not know what the plans were.’
Lesson 2: Never underestimate the enemy and get your war intelligence in order.
Russia’s espionage services, new intelligence revealed last week, played a major role in Ukraine’s painful underestimation. Anyone who had shouted in the Kremlin on February 24, shortly before the invasion began that Russia would still be fighting in Ukraine in August, would have been laughed at heartily. Or ended up in jail right away.
Yet that is now the harsh reality. Moscow has occupied some 20 percent of the country, but that’s only a consolation prize given Russia’s ambitious, megalomaniac war plan. Mainly because of misinformation from the Russian military intelligence service GRU and the FSB (the Federal Security Service), according to intelligence from Ukrainian and foreign espionage services that The Washington Post realised, the plan of attack was far too rosy.
There was no doubt among the intelligence services: the blitzkrieg to Kyiv would be successful, the Ukrainian resistance would be negligible. Kyiv could be occupied in days, according to the analysis of especially the FSB, the former KGB. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would have been caught, fled or dead and the population would applaud the Russian soldiers. FSB agents would then use that political vacuum to install a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv.
Opinion polls by the FSB showing that the Ukrainians would indeed resist the invasion were deliberately withheld from the Kremlin. “There was a lot of wishful thinking in the GRU and in the military, but it started with the FSB,” a Western intelligence official told the newspaper about the high spirits among Russian spies.
But the Russian march to Kyiv was by no means a copy of the US military’s successful 2003 blitzkrieg towards Baghdad. Astonished FSB agents who had already arranged apartments in Kyiv in advance, were forced to withdraw from the outskirts of the capital along with the Russian army because of the unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance.
“Vladimir Putin made a number of important errors of judgment in this war, partly on the basis of information from advisers who talked him into his mouth,” says Middendorp about the Russian president, who was also positive about the invasion. ‘But you shouldn’t get stuck in wishful thinking when you face setbacks. You always have to take various scenarios into account, including the worst-case scenario.’
To the horror of Putin and his generals, the Russian army must now watch as the Ukrainians in the south have launched a counter-attack, even striking Crimea. It is significant that the Russians did not make any territorial gains last Thursday. That was the first time in almost two months. In short: Moscow has entered a humiliating phase marked by military standstill.
Lesson 3: Don’t ignore the western military campaigns since 1991 and establish air superiority.
Various Russian blunders cost Moscow dearly. One of the most important is still that the air force does not rule in Ukrainian airspace. As a result, Russia cannot deploy its powerful air weapon as the US and the West did in the two Gulf Wars and the Kosovo War. On paper, the Air Force should be able to do this. With more than 3,000 aircraft, including state-of-the-art combat aircraft such as the Su-34 and Tupolev heavy bombers, the Russian air force is one of the strongest in the world.
However, the start of the ground war was not preceded by a day-long, large-scale air campaign to destroy the Ukrainian air force, air defenses, command centers, military headquarters and airfields. After all, whoever rules in the air, especially the wars in Iraq taught us, has already taken an important step towards victory. After the US knocked out the extensive Iraqi air defenses, the ground forces were able to proceed undisturbed.
However, the Russian air war failed to materialize, in large part because Ukraine had the S-300 air defense system that can shoot down fighter planes up to 200 kilometers from the sky. The entry into the battlefield of Western anti-aircraft missiles, such as the American Stinger, also frightened Russian pilots. As a precaution, they therefore flew at high altitudes and at night. That also made their attacks less accurate.
The failure of the air force has cost Moscow dearly. If the Russians had taken control of Ukrainian airspace, it would have been easier for them to hunt for heavy Western weapons, such as howitzers and the Himars missile system. ‘If you really want to conquer air superiority, you need an intensive campaign that takes several days,’ says Osinga. However, that didn’t happen.
Osinga points out that Russia now carries out about two to three hundred flights a day. According to him, that is small, given the amount of fighter aircraft available. Osinga: ‘Given the enormous size of Ukraine and the front, this is far too little to have too much of an effect. The result of all this is that Ukraine has been able to maintain freedom of movement on the ground and that the logistics lines have remained in use.’
Lesson 4: As a military force, invest in technologically advanced weapons.
The war has not done the image of the Russian weaponry a good service. With brute force, ‘old-fashioned’ weapons such as artillery and World War II tactics, the Russian army has occupied a part of Ukraine. But they could not settle the war. Thanks to the tens of thousands of modern, advanced Western weapons, from the Himars and the Javelin anti-tank missile to the howitzers, that the Ukrainian army effectively deployed.
Russia also deployed its high-tech weapons, such as the Kalibr cruise missile. But less than 40 percent hit the target, according to a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official. A bridge to the south near Zatoka had to be attacked eight times to take him out.
‘The Russian equipment appears to be of lesser quality’, confirms professor Osinga. ‘Especially in the early stages of the war, we saw the value of modern defense systems such as Javelins and Stingers. Hundreds of Russian vehicles and tanks were thus eliminated, and that concerned the most deployable and most modern tanks and armored vehicles that Russia had.’
Middendorp: “This war has not only shown the importance of small, smart weapons that have proven to be very powerful and with which you can bring down a fighter plane worth tens of millions of euros, but also of drones, which were used by Ukraine to target important targets such as command centers. to change gear. Drones are indispensable, as has once again been demonstrated, for every modern armed forces.’