Comparisons with the first world war are overheated. But ammunition consumption in Ukraine has far outstripped both pre-war expectations and production capacity, exposing gaping holes in the West’s stockpiles
Soviet generals realised that America, with its lead in microelectronics, was racing ahead in the development of long-range precision weapons, sensors to spot targets, and networks to connect the two. They gave this a grand name: the “reconnaissance-strike complex”. Operation Desert Storm, America’s swift and easy triumph over Iraq in 1991, seemed to offer further proof of the concept.
This orgy of indecisive human and material destruction over a trench-scarred landscape is not what military technologists had in mind when they talked up the. The war’s quintessential weapon, artillery, would be familiar to a Napoleonic soldier. “What blunted the Russians north of Kyiv,” says Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute , a think-tank, “was two brigades of artillery firing all their barrels every day.
For years, the West’s armies have aspired to a way of war in which a cornucopia of “sensors” would detect targets, pass data to the best-placed “shooter”, whether a howitzer, missile or warship, and create a “kill chain”—or, to use a newer buzzword, a “kill web”—of unprecedented speed and efficiency. This was the vision of the Soviet reconnaissance-strike complex and the: a transparent and semi-automatic battlefield. Ukraine is not yet that.
This digitisation of hardware reflects a collision of old and new ways of war. Much kit Ukraine has received is vintage, such as Americanor Soviet missile launchers designed before the Cuban missile crisis, or is stripped of sensitive components. Ukraine is pioneering “the ability to turn it from a dumb piece of cold-war metal into something that’s genuinely networked and part of this algorithmic warfare,” says a foreign adviser in Kyiv.
At the tactical level, Russia has waged a form of networked warfare. After a sluggish start, it now uses computerised command and control to knit together drones and artillery batteries. It also has good human intelligence and satellites of its own. But the war has shown that intelligence is not enough: you also have to use it well.
Belgique Dernières Nouvelles, Belgique Actualités
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