Precision Fires and Ukraine

or (The Unexpected Virtue of Actually Hitting What You're Aiming At)

HIMARS firing ATACMS in Ukraine

The ongoing war in Ukraine has among many things given a certain perspective of what the character of the next conventional conflict the United States fights may look like.

First, it’s important to acknowledge that there are a lot of contingent factors that are specific to this conflict that don’t more broadly apply, and even more poorly thought out arguments that aren’t worth dismissing (tanks are dead). However, as this conflict settles into a more static phase in the short term, it is worth taking a moment to discuss what has been observed as being more and less effective in terms of force design.

While the Russian military has increasingly adopted precision fires as the conflict has gone on—with Lancet loitering munitions and Krasnopol guided artillery rounds being two of the more prominent and effective examples—PGM usage has not been a central feature of Russian force design.

It’s not that I think the Russian military is too dumb to realize their importance on a contemporary battlefield, but is mostly just a functional consequence of the structural forces that go into their industrial production. They’re a semi-mobilized force with significant stockpiles of Soviet equipment with sanctions that restrict their access to enough technology to seemingly severely limit their production of high-end munitions.

To put it more directly—the Russian force hasn’t made precision munitions a central aspect of their military campaign because it doesn’t play to their strengths. As brutal and grinding as their offensive around Avdiivka has been, they have the industrial capacity and pool of manpower available to fight this kind of battle without these losses significantly impacting their ability to wage war.

Now the Ukrainian military is a bit more difficult to categorize in terms of what their actual overriding philosophy on the use of precision fires is.

The Ukrainian defense industry is likewise almost exclusively built around upgrading legacy Soviet platforms, rather than the production of more contemporary high-end precision capabilities. There is a reason why one of the most pressing needs of the Ukrainian military is for “dumb” artillery munitions—with tube and rocket artillery still being the single most decisive capability in this conflict.

They’re a military force that is somewhat schizophrenic in its composition as both Ukranian officers and Western analysts like Rob Lee, Jack Watling, and Michael Kofman have pointed out. So, anything I say here should be taken with some skepticism as a result the Ukrainian military is almost exclusively built upon legacy Soviet platforms with a strong Soviet doctrinal tradition.

With all of that being said, the Ukranians have made the use of precision fires a much more prominent feature of their military campaign so far. It's worth breaking this into two distinct forms of precision fires as well—domestic FPV loitering drone production and Western precision munitions.

In terms of domestic FPV loitering munitions, a lot of ink has already been spilled on this topic, so I’ll keep what I have to say here fairly brief. These are important capabilities, but I think they’re limited in the long run. Pushing away all of the glossy public hype around them—at its core an FPV loitering munition is essentially just a cheap guided missile with a small warhead.

I’d think of an FPV loitering munition as a less capable, but much more easily produced PGM, and I think you’re much closer to what battlefield role these fulfill than seeing them as a unique phenomenon in and of themselves. They’re a significant part of the Ukrainian successes in tactically overmatching the Russian military—and will continue to be so for the length of this war.

They’re clearly at their most effective when employed directly at the front, and have reportedly been extremely useful for targetting logistics directly behind the front. They are, however, primarily a tactical system that is employed at the lowest levels of war to produce an effect at the squad level. This isn’t to say that’s not necessary—it very much is—but it’s unlikely to produce more than a localized effect.

Long term, I think their actual viability is fairly limited in comparison to more robust high-end munitions. They’re highly vulnerable to electronic warfare—a capability that is also deceptively cheap and easy to produce—and increasingly cheap and widely fielded counter-drone munitions. Just as FPV drones have come into maturity in this conflict as a major tool, I think they’re probably at their high water mark.

This turns me to the topic I’m more interested in, which is the limited supplies of precision munitions provided by Western nations to Ukraine. Of the munitions provided, the SCALP-EG, GMLRS, and Storm Shadow have been the most effective. While they’re not war-winning in themselves—no single weapons system ever will be—they have had an outsized impact on the Ukrainian military’s ability to disrupt the Russian military in depth.

It has long been a principle of NATO warfighting that in general, you want to win a conventional fight through the disruption of an opposing force’s ability to effectively respond or contest your actions. While not without plenty of critics, John Warden’s The Air Campaign I think gives the most accessible and thorough treatment of this style of warfare.

The idea in the abstract is that by operating with a rapid targeting cycle with precision strike capabilities you’re able to implode an adversary’s decision-making ability. It is not necessary to destroy in detail an opponent’s military force if they simply are unable to make decisions with any sort of timeliness or clarity.

They may have more tanks than you at the front, but if they are left just sitting there without orders—then you can generate more mass at a decisive point to enable you to maneuver past them and exploit a breakthrough on the ground. This of course was the theory for the Ukrainian offensive in Zaporizhzhia that failed, which I would primarily assign to a lack of sufficient precision capabilities to degrade and destroy Russian communications more than any other factor.

This all being said, I don’t think it means these weapons haven’t had a palpable effect on the battlefield overall. Since the introduction of longer-range precision strike capabilities, Russian offensive actions have achieved little success at extraordinarily high cost.

In comparison to the battles early in the war around Sievierodonetsk where Russian forces could leverage their advantage in tube artillery to decisively defeat the Ukrainian military—similar Russian offensives since then have been poorly coordinated and feature a much closer parity in artillery. Forcing Russian command points to be decentralized and further from the front, alongside a decentralized supply system, and not to mention superior counter-battery capabilities have seemingly significantly impacted the Russian ability to execute offensive actions despite having on paper favorable force ratios.

While I did say earlier that Russia can afford to have a nearly limitless series of floundering offensives—the provision of more precision capabilities to Ukraine would move the needle on this enough to preclude further Russian attempts to advance.

The reason is fairly simple, with these contemporary systems all you need is to be able to detect something to be able to hit it. Sensors dominate the battlefront in Ukraine for a reason, as soon as you can detect a target there is no barrier to immediately conducting a strike (outside of any administrative delays). What once took dedicated artillery barrages days to accomplish—if they could accomplish the task at all given limitations on range—is now being done with a single strike package.

The only real factor as to why this has not been a larger factor in the war has been limitations on supply for Ukraine. Where these systems have been employed in dedicated strike packages, they’ve had a structural impact on how Russia has to fight this war. As the Russians have adapted to these new threats, I think we’ve all sort of forgotten the actual impacts that they’ve had—the Russian military simply isn’t able to fight how they want to.

Going back to the concept of the rapid and overwhelming destruction of an adversary’s ability to direct their forces on a battlefield, there were just never enough PGMs supplied to Ukraine to create enough massed fires to achieve this effect. It’s not that it invalidates the concept, but to achieve this effect it has to be a systemic destruction of a communications network. However, given what precision capabilities have demonstrated, I do think it’s fair to say that with enough mass the theory of force design initiatives like FD2030 have been validated.

The near-term conclusions from all of this are fairly evident I think, namely to get more PGMs in the hands of the Ukranian military as quickly as we can. However, for the longer term look at a prospective war the United States may be fighting, the actual message is clear: long-range precision fires and as many as we can manufacture.