Unexpected Course of Ukraine’s War Invites a Reappraisal of America’s Military Outlook

Wars remake war. New weaponry, new tactics, new strategy time and again produce results no one predicted or thought possible.Revolutionary France’s levée en masse and Napoleon’s bold attacks prevailed over staid 18th-century siege warfare and subdued all Europe. The aggressive assaults produced horrendous casualties but were unable to move the Western Front trenches more than a few meters in World War I.Less than 20 years later, the European theater in World War II was the scene of blitzkrieg attacks — France, with Europe’s largest army, was overrun in six weeks — followed by the heavily mechanized Allied forces moving forward as fast as logistics permitted.The war in Ukraine seems to be remaking war once again. When Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to march into Kyiv in February 2022, he expected they’d be welcomed, and American intelligence assumed they’d encounter no serious resistance and called for evacuation.Both nuclear superpowers assumed superior conventional forces would prevail. Volodymyr Zelensky’s response — “I need ammunition, not a ride” — was considered naive, and the stalling of his 2023 counteroffensive was seen as proof Russia would win.Successive American presidents operated on that assumption. President Biden pressed Ukraine not to lob missiles into Russia for fear of a wider war. President Trump, at Anchorage in August 2025, pressed Ukraine not only to accept Russia’s Donetsk advances but to yield more territory to them.Both underestimated the ingenuity and morale that enabled Ukraine to turn relatively cheap and unsophisticated drones into war-winning weapons. As General David Petraeus explained in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Ukraine “is imposing persistent strategic pressure on a much larger adversary by attacking Russia’s front lines, air defenses, fuel depots, logistics and military infrastructure and by trying to isolate occupied Crimea,” which Mr. Putin seized in 2014.While imposing damage on Russia, Ukraine’s drones have created a killing zone into which Russian troops can’t venture. As economist Noah Smith writes, “The era of human infantry on the battlefield is drawing to a close.”Ukraine has developed a market system for manufacturing cheap drones and supplying them to units in proportion to their successful strikes, as reporter Yaroslav Trofimov writes.At the same time, Ukraine’s backers in Europe, having stepped up their defense spending as Trump (and previous presidents) urged, have moved from handcrafting to mass production of artillery shells.“The nature of war has changed and is changing much faster and more radically than most observers — and most of the world’s militaries — yet understand,” writes the Hudson Institute’s Walter Russell Mead. “Rifles, mortars and tanks appear to be going the way of sword fights and cavalry charges.”This type of warfare seems closer to the way the United States and its allies operated during World War II than how they have planned for conflicts in the Cold War and the years after. America used the industrial infrastructure built up by capitalist “robber barons” to mass-produce relatively simple and unsophisticated weaponry in very large numbers, to be deployed by large numbers of highly motivated but not very sophisticated troops.In the Cold War, in contrast, American strategists concentrated on developing very sophisticated and very expensive weapons, to foil what Soviet strategists were doing. After the Cold War, these weapons enabled America to enjoy total control of the air and to deploy troops capable of advancing and occupying territory with very low casualties.The limitations of that posture seem apparent in the current war with Iran. America and Israel were able to destroy the regime’s leadership class but without compelling surrender.Operations to open the Strait of Hormuz have been frustrated by Iranian missiles and drones inflicting damage on American allies, as the Trump administration (and its Democratic opponents) remains unwilling to engage in ground operations. As in Ukraine, the drone-equipped defense is prevailing.This has enormous implications for how the Pentagon does business. From the 1950s onward, it has concentrated on the slow, sometimes achingly slow, development of increasingly sophisticated weaponry that it has ultimately deployed in very small numbers. To the point that Lockheed’s chief executive, Norman Augustine, quipped that by 2054, the cost of one fighter jet would consume the entire defense budget.Whether and to what extent the Pentagon — what Mr. Trump calls, contrary to law, the Department of War — has adjusted to the way the Ukraine and Iran wars have remade war is of vital importance and a worthy subject of in-depth reportage. Recent reports that Lockheed Martin’s plans for a low-budget, quickly deliverable Patriot missile suggest that even large traditional defense companies are trying to adapt.Another open question is about one other factor, always critical in war, always difficult and sometimes impossible to measure: morale.If you look at election results in Ukraine prior to the Russian invasions, you see that the pro-Russian parties were competitive, perhaps even more popular than their rivals. Yet today, and since Mr. Zelensky’s call for “ammunition, not a ride” in February 2022, there’s no doubt that the large majority of Ukrainians oppose Russian conquest. Certainly Ukrainians’ ingenuity in developing drone warfare is a sign of shining morale.In contrast, morale in Russia’s conscript army, recruited heavily among disfavored ancestry groups and subject to enormous casualty and death rates, is surely rock-bottom low. And there’s polling evidence that, as Ukrainian drones target Russia’s oil and energy infrastructure, the Russian public, while not ready to reject Mr. Putin, is thoroughly sick of this war.Here at home, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s emphasis on warrior ethos and opposition to political correctness has been accompanied by increases in recruitment and perhaps — another good subject for reportage — improved morale.Yet the president’s failure to lay a predicate or explain his justification for the conflict with Iran, and his wobbling back and forth from negotiations with the mullah regime and active military measures, has left civilian, and voter, morale at low levels.When wars remake war, political leaders have an obligation to help voters understand the consequences and what may be required of them. That obligation is not being met.Creators.com

Unexpected Course of Ukraine’s War Invites a Reappraisal of America’s Military Outlook

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