Military Challenges

Soldiers, mud and Snow. Operating in war, in a cold climate is difficult. When the weather sits close to freezing water remains liquid. Every footfall, every tyre tread turns the ground into impassable mud. The mud clings to the feet, legs, hands and equipment. It becomes more and more difficult to maintain a level of operational momentum. When movement is prevented the troops become static, coated in mud with wet feet. Static troops are vulnerable to air and ground attack so movement is severely discouraged especially by day. At these temperatures feet do not freeze they absorb water and destroy the tissue and circulation leading to a condition known as 'immersion foot' or 'trench foot'. When left untreated the feet can eventually develop gangrene. The only solution is a period of dryness. Soldiers often wear previously soaked socks around their necks in an attempt to dry them out but wet boots soon return dry socks to their former state. Where soldiers have prepared underground shelters with smoke restricted fires they can get ahead of the game for a short periods. High leg, waterproof boots are a true bonus. Clean water becomes an issue in mud and as a result so does diarrhoea. Soldiers in trenches are often unable to move to latrines to defecate. Trench life is extremely uncomfortable. When temperatures get well below freezing, mobility is increased by the solid ground and frozen rivers. The troops can kick the snow from their boots and remain dry, if not warm. They can dry clothes by freezing and shaking the ice crystals out of them but feet still need a lot of protection; they can freeze to ice. Soldiers often sleep with their comrades feet tucked under their arm pits to defrost cold toes. Comrades sleep cuddled together to stay warm. The regular rotation of troops out from front lines to a short distance in the rear to dry out or get warm, reduces the casualty numbers from cold injuries significantly. The snow lays a blanket of warmth over shelters protecting them from the cold and from view. This also offers some defence against infra-red observation. The downside to snow is that it marks every movement of men and vehicles marking routes and hiding places to arial reconnaissance. Most soldiers prefer dry cold to wet cold and they prefer movement to sitting still. Right now the soldiers in Ukraine are dealing with wet cold and mud. Charities and support groups should concentrate their efforts on anything that will protect the feet and hands. Boots, socks, snow gaiters, thermals and so on. This will do more to keep soldiers in fighting condition and healthy than anything else at this time of year. Slava Ukraini! Who Dares Shares Robin Horsfall

After decades of increasingly rapid offensive maneuver, the Russo-Ukraine war is characterized by World War I-style attrition. The enemy can now detect the slightest movements and attack without notice, resulting in a battlefront locked into defensive strongholds with “soldiers buried in trenches, where even personnel rotations and medical evacuations have become perilous.” This is the result of three main developments. The first is small tactical drones, which are used to target military forces and equipment across air, land, and sea—and even fight other drones. The second is electronic warfare, which now encompasses tracing, jamming, and even taking over drone signals. It enabled an enemy to target back and eliminate specialized, difficult-to-replace crews. And the third is remote-controlled sensors of varying complexity. Generously deployed in contested but undefended “white spaces,” they create protective buffers preventing the enemy from sneaking through. https://lnkd.in/exVA6D7Z

As a former Armor & Cavalry officer it pains me to read this, but important lesson for modern warfare: Eastern Ukraine CNN — Ukrainian crews working on US-supplied Abrams tanks have told CNN of a series of the weaknesses and flaws with the armored vehicles, calling into doubt their utility on the war’s ever-changing frontlines.   Crews trained in Germany said the vehicles – the US military’s main $10 million battle tank used in Iraq against Saddam Hussein’s forces and insurgents – lacked armor that could stop modern weapons.   “Its armor is not sufficient for this moment,” said one crew member, callsign Joker. “It doesn’t protect the crew. For real, today this is the war of drones. So now, when the tank rolls out, they always try to hit them.”   Much of the Ukrainian frontline is now dominated by the use of self-destructing attack drones, tiny and accurate devices that can swarm infantry and even cause significant damage to tanks. The advent of these so called First-Person Vision (FPV) drones, flown by soldiers wearing gaming goggles, has changed the nature of the war, limiting movement and introducing a new element of vulnerability to armored vehicles.   Ammunition is also a problem, like elsewhere on the Ukrainian frontline. They say they seem to have the wrong type for the fight they are in. “What we have is more for direct tank-to-tank fights, which happens very rarely,” Joker said. “Much more often we work as artillery. You need to take apart a tree-line or a building. We had a case when we fired 17 rounds into a house and it was still standing.”   The Ukrainian crew expressed frustration the tanks were made for a NATO style of warfare, in which air power and artillery prepare the battlefield before tanks and infantry advance. Kyiv has long bemoaned its lack of artillery and air power. #ukraine #warinukraine #greatpowercompetition #usarmy #technology #tanks #slavaukraini https://lnkd.in/dTa9cXHy

My latest article: “Now go win the fight,” US tells Ukraine, but withholds air power and long-range weapons UKR has suffered from the US 6 month absence. Its energy sector has been destroyed. Its armed forces have been reduced. Ukrainians have been killed or maimed. UKR’s ability to liberate occupied territories has been offset by far more than 6 months because the pause allowed RUS to mobilise, set its defence industry on a war footing, build a coalition and grab the battlefield initiative. The US only resumed support it stopped 6 months ago. It helps UKR continue fighting, but not winning. Instead of providing HIMARS and Abrams in the hundreds, it is providing them in two-digit numbers. It is not providing Air Power. It has until now, denied UKR long-range strike capacity. It is not providing Air Defence in sufficient numbers to stop RUS missiles and drones. The US support does not mark a huge step forward. It marks a step away from the abyss. It will take a lot to reverse the consequence of Western slow and incremental defence support in the face of a concerted RUS effort to achieve the opposite: an ever-increasing supply of manpower, ammunition and weapons to its frontline units.   Still, Democratic Majority Leader Schumer told President Zelensky, "Ok, we got it done. Now go win the fight." The US has lacked a clear war-winning strategy throughout. According to the bill passed by Congress, however, the Biden administration, must submit a strategy that establish specific and achievable objectives. The strategy shall include an estimate of the resources required to help hasten UKR victory. While the term “UKR victory” is encouraging, it might also be deceiving. The US will most likely refrain from offering Ukraine a NATO membership. The US will not help close the sky over UKR to protect cities or support the Ukrainian men and women holding the frontline, defending Europe. Neither the US nor Europe is about to explore the window of opportunity created by UKR in the Black Sea and deploy a maritime task force. They will uphold its “no boots on the ground” policy. The West will likely continue pursuing the very same strategy that allowed peace to turn into war, and an attempted “Blitz Krieg” into a protracted war undermining both UKR and Europe. After six months of US absence, the National Security Council spokesperson on 23 April hinted that “UKR still doesn’t have a fully formed plan to defeat RUS”. He failed to mention that planning is impossible as UKR does not know if, what, when and in what quantity the US and Europe will provide ammunition and weapons. Less so since its partners are not setting up UKR for victory. https://lnkd.in/dngTegCZ

NATO military units will need weeks and months (!) to reach Ukraine in case of a new russian attack, — Euractiv ▪️Portugal is located about 41 hours by car from Ukraine, but if security guarantees are provided, its military will need significantly more time to reach Lviv; ▪️To transport tanks across the entire continent, troops need to obtain diplomatic permits for each country they cross; ▪️Moreover, one unnamed EU country requires a 45-day notice to issue a cross-border transit permit. During this time, a Leopard 2 tank, moving at full speed (70 km/h) for 8 hours a day, could travel more than half the Earth's equator (about 25,200 km). Security checks can further delay troop movements. The European Commission is currently considering a package of legislative simplifications to eliminate such bottlenecks in military mobility.

Russia is increasingly losing one of the key advantages it built after 2022 — strategic logistical depth in the occupied south of Ukraine. What is unfolding now across the Mariupol–Berdiansk–Melitopol–Crimea corridor is not simply a series of drone strikes. It is the systematic degradation of Russia’s operational sustainment architecture. Several strategic observations stand out: Ukraine has expanded the effective strike depth of FPV and loitering systems from tactical ranges (10–20 km) to operational-level distances of 75–150 km. This changes the nature of warfare entirely. The targets are no longer frontline vehicles or isolated assets, but the core logistical arteries responsible for ammunition, fuel, drone supply, reserve movement, maintenance, communications, and battlefield sustainment. The R280 “land corridor” has become one of the most vulnerable points in Russia’s southern campaign architecture. This route was designed to reduce dependence on the Kerch Bridge and integrate Crimea, occupied Zaporizhzhia, and Donbas into a unified military logistics network. Now this network is increasingly contested. What makes the situation especially significant is the economics of asymmetry: relatively low-cost autonomous strike systems are forcing a much larger military structure into expensive defensive adaptation with no scalable solution currently visible. Attempts to protect hundreds of kilometers of highways, fuel movement, repair assets, and supply convoys create a structural dilemma: disperse logistics and lose efficiency; concentrate logistics and become vulnerable to precision attrition. At the same time, the widespread deployment of machine-vision-assisted drones reduces the effectiveness of traditional electronic warfare systems. This signals an important evolution in modern battlefield autonomy. The broader implication goes beyond Ukraine. Modern war is rapidly shifting toward: logistical denial; distributed autonomous strike capability; industrial-scale drone warfare; infrastructure attrition; operational isolation of entire force groupings. This is no longer purely a contest of maneuver warfare. It is increasingly a contest of sustainment capacity, adaptation speed, technological integration, and economic endurance. The southern theater may become one of the clearest demonstrations in modern military history of how relatively inexpensive autonomous systems can systematically erode the logistical foundations of a much larger conventional force.

MINUS TWO BATTALIONS PER DAY: NATO JUST SAW THE DRONE WAR UP CLOSE Last spring, during NATO’s “Hedgehog-2025” exercise in Estonia, a high-intensity scenario simulated what the Ukrainian battlefield already looks like: saturated with drones, transparent, and unforgiving. The result was uncomfortable. In one phase, a British-Estonian battle group of several thousand troops behaved as armies have trained for decades: tents deployed, vehicles positioned, movement without serious masking. In a battlefield made “transparent” by UAVs, that was enough. They were effectively wiped out. Opposing them was a 10-person Ukrainian team using the Delta battlefield management system. Within half a day, they simulated the destruction of 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 additional strikes. The density: 30 drones over less than 10 square kilometers - only half of what is observed on parts of the Ukrainian front. The officer playing the adversary summarized it bluntly: under those conditions, you can eliminate two battalions per day. This is not about better pilots. It is about the kill chain. Ukraine compresses detection, identification, decision, and strike into minutes. Data is shared fast, widely, and without the institutional reflex to over-classify. NATO units, by contrast, struggled with decision speed and information flow. The instinct to restrict sensitive data slowed response. On a drone battlefield, delay equals destruction. The deeper shock was “transparency.” There is no rear. No safe assembly area. No hidden logistics park. When UAVs, from FPV to ISR platforms, are persistent, everything emits a signature. Everything is targetable. And the exercise used only half the drone density Ukraine sees daily. General David Petraeus put it correctly: lessons are not absorbed automatically. They require new doctrine, new procurement logic, new training pipelines, and even new personnel policies. Meanwhile, Russia continues to adapt: pairing FPVs with other drone platforms, deepening kill zones, experimenting with combinations that extend range and targeting persistence. The implication is uncomfortable but clear: modern war is not about adding drones to existing structures. It is about reorganizing the entire force around a permanently observed battlespace. Those who fail to adapt do not lose slowly. They lose two battalions per day.

Medic Winnie: 80% of soldiers who might have survived with timely evacuation died waiting. On today’s battlefield, drones hunt evacuation teams and the critically wounded rarely survive long enough to be saved, writes Kyiv Independent. Russian forces monitor radio. The moment they hear “evacuation” — they send a drone swarm. Everything flies at the evacuation groups. Vehicles cannot get closer than 10-20 km from forward positions. Wounded soldiers wait hours, days, sometimes over a month. Critically injured rarely survive that long. Most soldiers reaching stabilization points have only light wounds — the critically wounded never make it. 90% of all injuries are now FPV drone wounds, “Before 2024 it was artillery. Now it’s FPV, which flies directly at you and you can’t do anything.” Ground robots evacuate the wounded when humans cannot. But Russian drones now target UGVs intensely. Deputy battalion commander Webster, 38th Marine Brigade: UGVs fail to reach positions four out of five times. Casualty collection points are detected within hours no matter how often Ukraine moves them. Bridges get destroyed. Pontoon bridges don’t last. Roads are mined. Medic Panda: She prepares for an incoming wounded — only to learn he never made it. Even soldiers who reach surgeons are not safe. Lead surgeon Andrii Telezhnyi sometimes stops an operation midway — calculating whether the patient can survive the hours-long trip to Dnipro. Surgeon shortages force month-long basement rotations with no breaks. Winnie gives false hope to dying soldiers over radio when he knows evacuation will never come. “Even when you know a person is gone, you still try to give him hope so he can relax a bit in his last moments.” Telezhnyi: “We need to learn to accept the reality of war. Every case must teach us how to save the next wounded person.”

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗿𝘁𝘆 𝘃𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗮 𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮 𝘁𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹 The most important number in Ukraine’s mid-range strike campaign may not be the range of the drones, but the daily rhythm of destroyed and damaged Russian logistics vehicles. Clément Molin reports that 90 additional Russian trucks and vehicles were hit in three days, suggesting a current targeting rate of roughly 30 vehicles per day. That is still an OSINT-based snapshot, not a guaranteed long-term average, but the extrapolation shows why this matters: 30 vehicles per day means 210 per week, 840 over four weeks, or around 900 in a 30-day month if the rate can be sustained. That is where #DroneWarfare becomes logistics warfare. One destroyed truck is a tactical loss, but hundreds of vehicles removed from the supply chain create a different kind of pressure, because fuel trucks, cargo vehicles, recovery assets and military transport are not infinitely replaceable when they are being hunted across operational depth. The real effect is not only material destruction. It is behavioural change. Drivers slow down, routes become predictable, convoys disperse, daytime movement becomes riskier, fuel distribution becomes more fragile, and Russian commanders are forced to spend air defence, electronic warfare, camouflage, repair capacity and mobile security on roads that used to be treated as rear-area infrastructure. This is why the mid-range strike campaign should not be judged only by spectacular single videos. Its power is cumulative. Ukraine is turning the road network behind the front into a contested battlespace, and every additional hit adds friction to Russia’s ability to move fuel, ammunition, personnel and equipment at scale. For #MilitaryLogistics, the lesson is brutal but simple: a force can have artillery, tanks and infantry, but if its trucks are hunted every day, operational tempo starts to rot from the inside. The truck is not glamorous, but it is the bloodstream of modern land warfare. For #EuropeanSecurity and #DefenseIndustry, this is also a warning. The future rear area will not be safe just because it is distant from the trench line. It will be observed, mapped, targeted and revisited by cheap systems that can turn logistics from a background function into the main battlefield. 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱 𝘮𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘵.

What Security Guarantees Ukraine Actually Needs Lately there have been many talks about possible “security guarantees” for Ukraine. It’s time to cut through the noise and lay out what real assurances could look like. 1. No more illusions about russian “guarantees.” History has shown one thing beyond doubt: russia’s promises are worthless. From the Budapest Memorandum to countless ceasefires, Moscow has broken every pledge the moment it suited them. Trusting russian “guarantees” is not diplomacy – it is self-delusion. 2. Foreign troops on the ground? Some suggest U.S. or European “peacekeepers” in Ukraine. The hard truths: * U.S. boots on the ground are politically impossible – neither party supports it. * Credible deterrence would require 100,000+ troops – far more than Europe could muster. * In the event of a direct russian attack, foreign troops might withdraw rather than fight a nuclear power. * A few thousand casualties could shatter European political will and force retreat, leaving Ukraine more vulnerable. In short, symbolic deployments are dangerous illusions. Only a massive, long-term NATO-level commitment would work – and that’s not realistic today. 3. Arming Ukraine – the only reliable guarantee. The most credible guarantee is a fully armed Ukraine. Not emergency trickles of aid, but long-term, institutionalized rearmament, similar to Israel’s multi-year U.S. aid packages. That means: * Guaranteed access to modern air defenses, jets, long-range missiles, and ammunition. * Automatic funding mechanisms, not ad hoc aid votes. * A permanent defense-industrial partnership with the West. This also requires building Ukraine’s own defense base. Once a major supplier in the USSR, Ukraine has now scaled up domestic production of drones, missiles, armored vehicles, and more. Sustained investment will make Ukraine militarily self-reliant. 4. Nuclear deterrence – the broken Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine once had the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, surrendered in 1994 for “guarantees” from the U.S., U.K., and russia. We know how that ended. Short of re-nuclearization, the West must provide: * Extended nuclear deterrence: a formal U.S./U.K. nuclear umbrella, akin to NATO’s Article 5. * Conditional reconsideration: if russia persists in war, Ukraine should reserve the right to rebuild its nuclear arsenal. Even that possibility would alter Moscow’s calculus. 5. Binding legal and military commitments. Guarantees must be treaty-based, binding, and enforceable – not political handshakes. Options include: * NATO membership (the gold standard, though delayed politically). * Bilateral defense treaties with the U.S., U.K., and European allies, ratified by parliaments, committing weapons, troops, and sanctions in case of russian aggression. * Permanent sanctions triggers: automatic penalties for border violations, eliminating Western hesitation.