Russia has significantly improved its ability to learn and adapt in Ukraine over the two years of war, Foreign Affairs reports.
Throughout the war in Ukraine, Kyiv and Moscow have tried to learn and improve their military effectiveness. In the early stages of hostilities in February 2022, Ukraine had an advantage. The rapid influx of Western weapons helped Kyiv develop new ways of fighting in a surprisingly short time.
After two years of war, however, the situation has changed. The gap in the quality of warfare between Ukraine and Russia has narrowed. Ukraine still has an innovative and bottom-up military culture that allows it to rapidly introduce new technologies and tactics to the battlefield. But it has struggled to get these lessons systematised and rolled out across its armed forces. Russia, on the contrary, is adept at systematising these lessons across its armed forces and large defence industry.
These differences are reflected in the way innovations are implemented. Ukraine is better at tactical adaptation: learning and improving on the battlefield. Russia excels at strategic adaptation, or learning and adaptation that affects national and military policies, such as how states use their resources. Both forms of adaptation are important. But it is the latter type that is most important for winning a war.
The longer hostilities last, the better Russia will learn, adapt, and build a more effective, modern fighting force. Slowly but surely, Moscow will rebuild its tactics, absorbing new ideas from the battlefield. Strategic adaptation has already helped it repel Ukraine’s counter-offensive, and in the past few months it has helped Russian forces wrest new territory from Kyiv. Ultimately, if Russia’s advantage in strategic adaptation persists without a corresponding Western response, the worst that can happen in this war is not a stalemate. It is Ukraine’s defeat, according to Foreign Affairs.
Russia has taken the experience of the first months of fighting in Ukraine into account and adapted its command and control structure. In April 2022, the country appointed a single commander to oversee combat operations, abandoning the dysfunctional and fragmented system that had been in place up to that point. The result was a more unified effort that resulted in Russia having a synchronised approach, with ground operations in eastern Ukraine being the main effort. This led to Russian successes and the liberation of cities such as Severodonetsk in mid-2022.
Russia also changed its close combat techniques. At the beginning of the war, the Russian army used combined battalion-sized ground units, which were often understrength and showed limited ability to integrate air and ground operations and conduct ground combined arms operations. But over the past 12 months, the Russians have abandoned such ineffective battalions.
Some of these tactical innovations were driven by military necessity, including Russia’s lack of time to train mobilised troops to a high level of proficiency. But some were dictated by strategic directives from above.
Russian troops adapted to defence as well. After slightly strengthening its positions at the start of the war – and thus opening itself up to Ukrainian offensives – Moscow built deep defencive lines in the south in late 2022 and early 2023. Combined with Russian improvements in shortening the time between target detection and battlefield strikes, in the second half of 2023 the Ukrainians faced an adversary very different from the one they faced in 2022.
To defeat this changed adversary, Ukraine was forced to adapt its tactics, technology, and operations, including sending some troops to Poland and other European countries for additional general military training before launching a counter-offensive. But Kyiv’s efforts were still not enough to recapture much of the south of the country.
The Russian military has also become better at protecting its equipment. The country’s troops have started creating makeshift armour. This improvised armour became more sophisticated over time and was called “cope cages” – plate or checkered armour.
Such armour has been used in modern conflicts, including by coalition forces involved in the Iraq war in 2003, and now on Russian tanks and self-propelled artillery units. These cells helped either suppress the fuzes of Ukrainian anti-tank guns before they penetrated the main armour of the vehicle, or forced the anti-tank guns to denature before they could penetrate the vehicle. Together, these cages provided another layer of physical protection for Russian tanks and trucks and appear to have given their crews more confidence to operate in places where the risk of drone or mounted munitions attacks is high, Foreign Affairs reports.
This defencive approach could be called a tactical innovation. But over time, the use of cages became systematised. The Russian army began using cages en masse as a systematic approach to combat lurking munitions, upper-range missiles (such as Javelin) and drones. In 2023, Russian commanders even issued official guidance on how to design and install anti-tank cages on trucks, artillery and armoured vehicles. Moscow now offers such cages on export versions of its armoured vehicles.
Moscow, meanwhile, has become much better at deploying drones on its own, reversing the previous dynamic. Early in the war, Ukraine helped develop new ways to use remotely piloted, semi-autonomous and autonomous drones for everything from reconnaissance to dropping bombs. A self-proclaimed drone army built up by government, industry and popular crowdfunding has given Kyiv a particularly impressive early advantage in the use of drones.
But while Russia has been slower to adopt drones for a wide range of purposes, it has now overtaken Ukraine in the number of drones and hover munitions, as well as the ability to use them. Moscow achieved this by mobilising its own defence industry and obtaining critical technology from abroad, despite Western sanctions. It now surpasses Ukraine when it comes to drones and mounted munitions. This gap is likely to widen further.
Modern warfare is virtually impossible without deploying large numbers of unmanned aerial vehicles and actively countering enemy drones. Russia’s use of UAVs, combined with defencive lines, more artillery, attack helicopters, stealth munitions, and more operational intelligence and surveillance systems, was a key reason for the failure of Ukraine’s counter-offensive in 2023. And as Russia continues to ramp up drone production, it will gain an increasing advantage, according to Foreign Affairs.
Drones are not the only weapons that have changed the course of the fighting. Ukraine was early to adopt precision-guided weapons – weapons that use GPS or other guidance systems to hit targets more accurately than older systems. Kyiv was forced to do so; given the disparity in artillery and ammunition at the start of the war, Ukraine could not afford to waste missiles and shells. But Moscow has since learnt and adapted to reduce the effectiveness of precision weapons. To do so, it has better dispersed its combat forces, artillery and logistics. It has also made it harder for Ukrainian forces to target them by using more reliable means of electronic communication, including encrypted networks and old wired tactical communication systems.
Traditionally a strength of the Russians, electronic warfare played a minor role in the early days of the conflict. But it has returned with renewed vigour. The Russian military, in cooperation with its strategic defence industry, has developed and deployed a range of new and improved vehicle- and personnel-based electronic warfare systems. They jam Ukrainian communications, slowing the country’s ability to conduct attacks by disrupting unit cohesion.
Electronic warfare also interrupts communications between drones and their operators, helps Russia locate drone operator stations, makes it difficult for Ukraine to locate Russian headquarters and, importantly, jams or reduces the effectiveness of Ukrainian precision weapons (including high-mobility artillery rocket systems, or HIMARS). Although Ukraine and its partners are making every effort to keep pace, they still lag behind Russian electronic warfare capabilities, as Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny said in late 2023.
The most telling area in which Russia has adapted and created a strategic advantage is its defence industrial complex. The September 2022 partial mobilisation and other government initiatives have dramatically increased military output. As a result, Russia now has far more weapons and ammunition than Ukraine, Foreign Affairs reports.
Russia is changing the composition and timing of its sophisticated and massive drone and missile attacks to expose weaknesses in Ukraine’s air defences. And some cruise missiles, such as the Kh-101, have been adapted to launch flares as a defence mechanism against Ukrainian strikes.
The Russian military complex has developed an advanced, ever-improving cycle of adaptation that links lessons from combat with Russian industry and strategies. This could provide the Russians with a significant military advantage in the coming years.
Russia could gain an improved ability to strike from the sky by suppressing a Ukrainian air defence system lacking sufficient interceptor missiles. In addition, this could lead to further Russian successes on the ground.
To become better at strategic adaptation, Ukraine must remove the institutional and temporal obstacles that stand between tactical training and doctrinal innovation and learning. For example, a key lesson of the Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 is that the general military doctrine that NATO taught Ukrainian troops is outdated. As a result, Ukrainian individual soldiers and units lack the intellectual armour required to conduct offensive operations in the modern environment, according to Foreign Affairs.
It is imperative that NATO and Ukraine accelerate the exchange of combat lessons and link them to doctrine and training institutions so that the alliance and Kyiv can quickly develop better doctrine and better forms of training. NATO, in particular, should use its vast analytical capabilities to help the Ukrainians quickly understand what works. By better linking tactical lessons to strategic changes, the West could reshape the way it wages war in a way that makes it much easier for Ukraine to adapt its overall warfare strategy.
The West should, of course, continue to arm Ukraine with modern weapons. However, while it is important to increase the overall volume of Western supplies, it is imperative that the West focus on producing and shipping the weapons that are most likely to provide Kyiv with a strategic advantage. It must therefore create a closer link between Ukrainian tactical training and industrial production. Combat lessons must be quickly transferred from the battlefield to manufacturers so that soldiers can more easily influence the production of equipment and ammunition.
All institutions have a limited capacity to absorb change within a short period of time – what political scientist Michael Horowitz calls “adaptive capacity” – and Ukrainians have already undertaken a huge number of different adaptations in this war. It doesn’t help that for adaptation to really work, it has to be multifaceted and comprehensive. Military historian and analyst T. X. Hammes writes in an April report:
“New technologies are vital to every capability. But like the development of blitzkrieg or airpower, these transformational capabilities can only be realised by effectively combining multiple technologies and embedding them in coherent, well-prepared operational concepts.”
This requires good leadership, rapid experimentation, and the humility to learn from one’s mistakes, Foreign Affairs reports.
Ukraine should not waste time implementing these measures. Russia has greatly improved its ability to learn and adapt in Ukraine. The longer the war in Ukraine lasts, the more Moscow will improve its strategic adaptation. The most compelling rationale for improving Ukraine’s strategic adaptation and impeding Russia’s adaptation is to ensure that Ukraine does not lose the war. Russia currently holds the strategic initiative, so defeat is still possible.
