War Lessons

War Lessons

Z Blog

That is the first lesson of this war. Outside of asymmetric wars, like America attacking a weak country, manned combat aircraft is becoming obsolete. Surface-to-air missile systems are reaching the stage where they can defeat the best manned aircraft at pennies on the dollar. If you can take out a billion dollar plane with a million dollar missile, it is not going to take long before the other side stops using their billion dollar planes to attack you.

That is another lesson of the war. Wars between peers are about economics, not flashy displays of technological prowess. Each side must try to reduce the per unit cost of destroying the opponents assets and defending its own assets. Assuming equal number of assets at the start, the game becomes a contest of efficiency. The side that can run the war most cost effectively wins. We are seeing that in Ukraine as the frugal Russians grind down the extravagantly financed Ukrainians.

That brings up another lesson of this war. The vaunted American military industrial complex is being revealed to be a bigger fraud than suspected. Last summer, Alex Vershinin pointed out the problems in the Western military industrial capacity versus that of the Russians. He concluded that the West simply lacked the industrial capacity to wage this war. In December Brian Berletic did a similar post on this topic, which had been covered in the Washington Post and Financial Times.

The United States has spent roughly a trillion dollars per year on weapons but there is not enough stock to last a year in a real war. Even if there is a shift toward ramping up production, it will take years to match the Russians and Chinese. In some cases, the ability to make the stuff has been lost. Once the contract with the military was fulfilled, the men and facilities to make the stuff was repurposed. For those cases it means starting production from scratch.

It actually is worse than anyone is letting on. The Pentagon refuses to consider supplying Ukraine with Abrams tanks. One reason is it takes a year to train a crew to competently operate the thing. The main reason, however, is these tanks are extremely fragile outside of optimum environments. Their size and complexity require a massive supply chain to keep the things running. That is great for the contractors, but it is an enormous liability for an army at war.

Probably the biggest lesson thus far is that drones are changing the battlefield in ways no one anticipated. Faced with massive defense works, the Russians were reduced to using their artillery advantage to pound the Ukrainians. Cheap drone technology has allowed them to efficiently target enemy positions and selectively hunt for opposing machines using inexpensive weapons. The cheap drone is not only a new weapon on the battlefield it is a force multiplier.

Of course, the biggest lesson is that fighting in your backyard is much easier than fighting across the sea. The Russians have short tight supply lines because Ukraine is right on her border. The Ukrainians, reliant on American money and material, have supply lines stretched thin. Those donated tanks and artillery pieces have to be shipped to Poland to be repaired. Another lesson of this war is that supply chain is as important as the weapons and ammunition it supplies.

Whether anyone in the West is learning anything from this is hard to know, but most likely the corruption is so thick that none of this is making sense to them. Making billion dollar jet fighters is much more fun and profitable than producing cheap drone technology or building better field artillery. If these lessons will be learned at all it will be in a colossal failure in the Pacific. That seems to be where the military industrial complex is determinedto meet its fate.