The West Armed Ukraine for a Caricature of Modern War
An outdated view of warfare helps explain why the U.S. was slow to supply long-range missiles.
The United States is finally getting around to supplying Ukraine with some of the long-range weaponry that the Ukrainians have been requesting for months. For far too long, Ukraine’s Western allies have largely been arming that country to fight a caricature of modern war, not the real thing.
The results of that decision are evident on maps that, more than 500 days after Russia’s invasion, show only small, incremental changes in the front line. The Ukrainians started a much anticipated counteroffensive almost four months ago and have pushed the Russians back in a few places in the Zaporizhzhia region but have not achieved a full-scale armored breakthrough. By contrast, Ukrainian missile strikes behind enemy lines have produced noteworthy successes in recent months—most notably in forcing Russia to withdraw major elements of the Black Sea Fleet from its base in the port of Sevastopol in occupied Crimea.
When Russia prepared to invade Ukraine in February 2022, many military analysts imagined tank-led columns advancing rapidly and overwhelming the Ukrainian army—a vision of war that has continued to shape Western policy now that Ukraine is trying to reclaim territory. The U.S. and other NATO countries have provided armored vehicles and combined-arms-warfare training, mainly to help Ukraine make direct attacks on Russian front lines. But making a decisive breakthrough at the front, always difficult, has become extremely challenging. The Russians, for their part, spent five months attacking the small Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, taking a tiny parcel of ground at an enormous cost in casualties. Defensive weaponry has made even the best tanks and vehicles vulnerable to damage from a variety of cheaper, more numerous types of equipment. If vehicles mass together in preparation for an attack, they can be destroyed or at least slowed down in many different ways—with mines, artillery, handheld rocket launchers, or, in more and more cases, drones.
The one successful breakthrough exploitation of the past 16 months happened when Ukraine was able to attack a very lightly defended part of the Russian line in the Kharkiv region. This underscores how forward advance is possible only if Ukraine can identify weak points—or create them by striking military installations and logistics deep behind the front, so that Russia cannot move personnel, weaponry, and supplies to the front. This is why Ukrainian officials have been so insistent on obtaining the U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS (pronounced “attack-ems”). This ammunition, which can be fired from the vehicle-mounted High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, has a much longer range—up to about 190 miles—than conventional artillery and even the Western-supplied Multiple Launch Rocket System that Ukrainian forces used to great effect in the first year of the war. Unfortunately, the U.S. has offered Ukraine only a limited diet of long-range weapons. As I argued earlier this year, the West’s approach to military aid was preparing Ukrainian forces to fight the hardest possible campaign.
Only when the United Kingdom supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which typically are fired from aircraft and have a range of more than 150 miles, and France followed with SCALP missiles (its version of the same weapons system) could Ukraine begin hitting high-value targets—bridges, supply depots, anti-aircraft systems—deep in Russian-occupied areas, including Crimea. The most consequential attacks have been on the Russian navy base in Sevastopol. Using just a handful of the British and French missiles, the Ukrainians have destroyed two major Russian warships, including a new Kilo-class submarine that the Russians have used to fire on Ukraine, and seriously damaged the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet itself. Yet the U.K. and France have a modest supply of the missiles. Ukraine has already fired approximately 100 of them, by some estimates, and needs to be very particular about when and where it uses any others.
In retrospect, Russia’s most successful campaign of the war has been what could be called its “great escalation bluff.” Perhaps because the Russians realize how vulnerable they are to long-range fire, they have always implied that giving Ukraine greater reach could lead to a broadening of hostilities, even a nuclear response. As the muted reaction to the attacks on Sevastopol in September has shown, this rhetoric was empty—a desperate ploy to dissuade the West from properly arming Ukraine.
That this ploy succeeded is a shame, and Western nations should stop falling for it.
Although Ukraine will now get ATACMS ammunition, the system—along with the F-16 fighters that Ukrainian pilots will likely be flying sometime in the first half of 2024—will arrive too late for the summer counteroffensive. Having missed a major opportunity to help Ukraine make more significant advances, the Biden administration should not make the same mistake again. The U.S. has many other potentially useful kinds of equipment in stock, such as the AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, which is relatively difficult for enemy forces to detect. The U.S. has thousands of early-generation JASSMs in stock and should provide them if requested. Germany has the well-designed Taurus missile system. Taken together, all of these weapons would have given Ukraine a formidable arsenal to take apart Russia’s entire logistics system in occupied territory in Ukraine, devastate the Sevastopol base, and isolate Crimea as a supply route. That would have weakened the Russians at the front far more than any direct assaults at prepared positions with armored vehicles.
Helping Ukraine win the war as quickly as possible is imperative. It’s also the best way to limit future destruction and casualties. Yet the combination of Russian nuclear threats and the West’s outdated visions of major tank breakthroughs has put Ukraine in a difficult position. Because frontal assaults are so dangerous and vehicles are so vulnerable to attack, the Ukrainians have been proceeding on foot, undertaking an infantry-based campaign that could continue all autumn and even into the winter. The more that Western allies prioritize long-range weapons, the more Ukraine can wear down Russian resistance and take back its own territory.