Eye on Eurasia Special Report: The Ukraine Battlelab
By guest contributor Timothy L. Thomas
The Ukraine Battle Lab: Russian Adaptations to Contemporary War’s High-Tech Developments
Hi everyone!
Welcome to my first-ever guest posting provided by my colleague - Timothy Thomas, a noted expert on the Russian military. Given that the popularity of my Substack has grown in recent months- and is now being read in 49 states and over 104 countries - I have decided to publish my first-ever special report utilizing Tim’s insightful research to share with my subscribers.
Tim is one of the leading American experts on the Russian military and it is a delight to be able to share his report with you to help broaden our understanding of the Russian military. In his lengthy report, he offers some timely and important insights into Russian lessons learned from three years of fighting in Ukraine. One of the major Russian lessons of that war, according to Tim, is that there are no rules anymore in modern warfare in Putin’s Russia.
A link is below so please share this report by clicking the share button and feel free to click the Substack like button or offer any feedback as I continue to keep a firm Eye on Eurasia!
Glen
Executive Summary
Russia has been at war with Ukraine now for over two years. Both sides have suffered tremendous losses. Each nation has been offered help from allies, with NATO helping Ukraine and China, Iran, and North Korea helping Russia. If internal collective, deceptive, and aggressive planning among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korean leaders continues to expand, they may seek global advantages as a coalition. The West may have to deter not just an autocracy’s cyber effort but autocracies acting in unison. The U.S. and NATO are already hard pressed to help both Ukraine and Taiwan simultaneously with military stocks, and the current debacle in Gaza has added to their requirements.
Meanwhile, Russia has recovered from several problems with its initial planning and performance. Notable events are: Western sanctions are not preventing Russia from obtaining key military parts, Russia’s partners are providing weapons and support to its actions, oil prices are in Russia’s favor, and Russia appears to have regained the initiative and is ready to go on the offensive again.
Russia’s recovery indicates this is not just a war of attrition or positional warfare but an intense war of production capabilities, a war of threats (from biological to nuclear), a war for territory and resources (oil sales, access to coal in Donbass, etc.), and perhaps most important a war of technical innovations and use. Whoever develops an unstoppable weapon will be the winner. The former head of Ukraine’s military stated that something new is needed (like gunpowder’s invention years ago). This time, he added, the decisive factor will come from combining all the technical solutions that already exist.
Nineteen adaptations/lessons of Russia’s military are listed in this document. Two examples are the importance of preemption (due to war at the speed of software) and the need to disorganize an opponent’s command and control capability at every opportunity. Both will play a role in shaping Russia’s use of space, where Russian President Vladimir Putin already is threatening the use of nuclear weapons in orbit. He wants a Starlink-type program while Defense Minister Belousov, who casts state intervention and not private business investment as the main economic driver, has promoted “national megaprojects,” one for the domestic drone industry and another for microelectronics. Some projects are underway.
Three key takeaways from these adaptations/lessons are that, first, global instability is increasing due to autocrats supporting Russian aggression, which threatens the widening of the fight’s scope. Second, the war has provided the first important indicators of high-tech confrontation (uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), cyber, electronic warfare, space, etc.) and has provided a deluge of information for intelligence experts on both sides about Russian systems and how to influence, jam, or destroy U.S. systems. U.S. military manufacturers will need to develop important counters to Russian systems while fixing our own problems. These counter systems and fixes need to be stockpiled not only to help abroad but to better protect the U.S. homeland, since numerous aggressors now have weapons that can reach us. Third, the war in Europe has shown how fragile peace has become when nonproliferation treaties, arms control agreements, and pledges to maintain the security of state borders disappear or are violated. The result is one of the most critical times in world history when numerous nations have the capability and, it seems, the will to attack one another from afar with a host of devices.
Introduction
“Russians recover fast, and that is a fact that you should keep in mind. They have proved that dozens of times. We should not underestimate this characteristic.” [1]
Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov
Ukrainian Military Intelligence Chief, April 2024
In June 2024, as this article is being written, Russia is again on the offense, trying to regain territory in northeast Ukraine it lost in the first year of conflict. The offensive is exploiting a lag in Western armament support to Ukraine due to congressional roadblocks for the release of funding. These roadblocks have limited the available firepower and protection measures of the Ukrainian military. Russia’s new push verifies Budanov’s statement above, and a new Russian Defense Minister focused on economics might enable Russia’s recovery even faster than expected.
During the two-plus years of conflict, Russia has had to adapt its military to fight a well-armed opponent. Do not expect the Kremlin to openly state what its adaptations have been. Instead, published Russian military articles must be scoured for either departures from or support for traditional Russian strategy, operations, and tactics, offering what did or did not pan out as the conflict unfolded. Aside from Russian publications, numerous adaptations have been spotted by Western journalists working in the trenches. It will take Russia time to write about most of them.
For example, The Economist wrote on how Russia is wrapping vehicles in corrugated metal (known as “turtle tanks”) to protect them from drone attacks that have destroyed two-thirds of Russian tanks in recent months. The metal is thought to deflect a drone, knock it off course, and make it less effective when it reaches the main armor. It also provides camouflage when a tank is stationary. However, the tank has trouble rotating its turret because of the metal addition, restricting visibility and ability to fire on attackers from all sides.[2] A Jamestown Foundation analysis noted how Russian GPS jamming in the Baltic region is increasing, perhaps designed to show NATO that it has asymmetric offensive capabilities that can wreak havoc for Baltic populations. GPS signals are important for airline transportation but also for critical infrastructure in the telecommunications, energy, and financial sectors.[3] These signals are also important for guiding some key U.S. precision weapons to their targets. Russia has electronic warfare capabilities to overwhelm some of the signals and frequencies.[4] Thus, uncovering adaptations, observations, and lessons is an all-encompassing process.
The following analysis first focuses on Russian observations and adaptations to combat conditions as culled from Russia’s military press. They indicate how Russia is conducting war now and its expectations for the future. This analysis is followed with several Western press reports of adaptations journalists have observed.
Adaptations/Observations/Lessons
Russia expected that its conflict with Ukraine would be over quickly. Perhaps for this reason, Russian analysis of the war was slow to appear in military journals. Only after the destruction of numerous Russian units and the abysmal performance of the Armed Forces (AF) in general did the need to write about the war take root. Russia recognized it had problems to correct. It took time to evaluate not just why things went wrong but how to fix them. Technological fixes take time. It was not until mid-2022 that references about the Special Military Operation (SMO) began to appear in Russian publications. They did not really proliferate until 2023. SMO references were not always in the title of articles (see Appendix One for these titles) but were interwoven into the context of many articles.
It must be remembered that these observations are from savvy Russian analysts but not from the Chief of the General Staff or other personnel of elevated importance who have a direct hand on the pulse of the Armed Forces (AF). Analyst observations are unclassified and found in Russian publications. Their importance and focus may or may not coincide with the classified findings of the General Staff.
There were many adaptations to consider. Some were covered earlier in other MITRE articles.[5] SMO observations/adaptations/lessons utilized in this analysis include the following topics, represented as “lessons” in the discussion:
1. War’s new content has transformed conflict
2. Technical and organizational issues take precedence over correlation of forces concepts (if you can be observed you can be destroyed)
3. Preemption doesn’t always work
4. Prepare mobilization efforts before invading
5. Attaining information superiority with the media and cyber is vital
6. Five areas of importance on which to focus
7. Growing importance of UAVs
8. Dispersed or positional defenses are required along with long-distance fights
9. New airborne developments
10. Increasing command and control stability of space communication systems
11. Logistical and communication issues
12. Aerosols and other nonlethals being used
13. What future platform investments should be expected
14. “Combination warfare” means there are no rules anymore in warfare
15. Use of nonstrategic nuclear deterrence (NSND) (regional) and strategic nuclear deterrence (SND) (strategic) threats to escalate so that you can deescalate when needed
16. Prolong the war to gain more territory
17. Artificial intelligence use involves risk but has positive and negative aspects
18. Putting a war economy above tradition
19. Putin rolled the dice and won—for now
To read the 40-page report in full please click here!
About the Author:
TIMOTHY L. THOMAS
Timothy L. Thomas is an analyst for the MITRE Corporation. He worked for 27 years at the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He retired from the U.S. Army as a Lieutenant Colonel in the summer of 1993. Mr. Thomas received a B.S. from West Point and an M.A. from the University of Southern California. He was a U.S. Army Foreign Area Officer who specialized in Soviet/Russian studies. His military assignments included serving as the Director of Soviet Studies at the United States Army Russian Institute (USARI) in Garmisch, Germany; as an inspector of Soviet tactical operations under CSCE; and as a Brigade S‑2 and company commander in the 82nd Airborne Division.
Mr. Thomas has conducted extensive research and publishing on military affairs in both Russia and China. He served as the assistant editor of the journal European Security, and as an adjunct professor at the U.S. Army's Eurasian Institute; and as an adjunct lecturer at the USAF Special Operations School. He has written three books on Russia’s military and over 23 articles on the Russian military in the past two years and two on China for MITRE.
[1] David Ignatius, “The Defiant Ukrainian General with no Smile,” The Washington Post, 18 April 2024, p. A19.
[2] No author provided, “What are the Russian ‘turtle tanks’ seen in in Ukraine?” The Economist, 15 May 2024.
[3] Otto Tabuns, “Russian GPS Games in the Baltic Sea Region,” The Jamestown Foundation, 15 May 2024.
[4] Isabelle Khurshudyan and Alex Horton, “Russian Disabling U.S. Arms in Ukraine,” The Washington Post, 25 May 2024, pp. 1, A10.
[5] The following topics were covered in 2023-2024 by this author in earlier MITRE projects regarding the war with Ukraine: EW, Aerospace Forces, future war, the drone arms race, space activities, artificial intelligence’s impact on military affairs, integrated combat systems, logistic planning, weapon replacements, air defense integration, defensive positions, combat engineers, airborne forces, urban tactics, and command-and-control issues. In 2022 the following were discussed: Putin’s reasons for war, totalitarian methodology, and difficult reasons for negotiating with him; communication issues in the armed forces, Russia’s scorched earth artillery issue, special operations forces, battalion tactical groups, territorial defense issues, Russian and Ukrainian psychological operations, Russia’s conduct of war to day, and what Taiwan and China may have learned watching the Ukraine conflict.