What 70 years of war can tell us about the Russia-Ukraine conflict

It had long been expected that any Russian invasion of Ukraine would unfold as some sort of postmodern warfaredefined by 21st century weapons as media manipulation, the disinformation blurring the battlefield, cyber attacks, false flag operations and unmarked combatants.

These elements have played out in this war.

However, what has prevailed is the traditional 20th century dynamic:

changes in battle lines of tanks and troops; urban assaults; struggles for air supremacy and supply lines; and massive troop mobilization and weapons production.

The outlines of the war, nearly a year after it began, look less like a future war than a certain type of conflict of decades past:

wars between nations in which one does not directly win the other.

These types of conflicts have become less frequent since 1945, a period associated with US civil wars, insurrections and invasions that quickly turned into occupations.

But wars between nations continued:

between Israel and the Arab states, Iran and Iraq, Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

These are the conflicts that military historians and analysts often cite when asked to establish parallels with the Russian war in Ukraine.

“They have great commonalities. In Korea, for example,” said Johns Hopkins University historian Sergey Radchenko, referring to the Korean War.

“Major Conventional Battles. Bombardment of Infrastructure”.

Every war is unique.

But a few trends that have occurred in this subset of conflicts, including the one in Ukraine, may help shed some light on what drives the fighting week after week, what tends to determine victory or failure, and how these wars often end or they don’t finish. end.

One after another, according to Radchenko, these wars started again territorial disputes which date back to the foundation of the contending countries and which, therefore, are rooted in the very conception that both sides have of their own national identity.

This makes the underlying conflict so difficult to resolve that clashes often recur over many decades.

These wars have often depended, perhaps more than any other factor, on the industrial wearas each side struggles to keep up the flow of materiel such as tanks and anti-aircraft munitions that keep them in combat.

But this works very differently from the competition for raw work that defined conflicts like the WWI, which focuses more on issues of technology, economic capacity, and international diplomacy.

A modern type of clothing

“Many conventional wars boil down to attrition,” analyst Michael Kofman recently said on the national security podcast “War on the Rocks.”

“The side that is best able to rebuild itself over time is the one that is able to maintain the war and ultimately win.”

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine It fits that model perfectly, which helps explain many of its twists, added Kofman, who is director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Virginia.

For example, each side’s ability to seize and hold territory largely depends on its own capacity deploy tanks and other heavy vehicles more reliably than your opponent.

And since air power is effective at destroying those vehicles, the attrition rate for any part on the ground depends in part on who controls the sky

This is consistent with other wars of this type.

Some analysts argue that Iran only ended its decade-long war with Iraq in the 1980s when it finally took control of the skies.

Similarly, the question of who controls the skies hinges heavily on Ukraine’s ability to deploy enough anti-aircraft weapons to keep pace with Russia’s ability to deploy aircraft.

It’s also a matter of attrition, even if economic and diplomatic as well as military.

This helps explain why Ukraine, whose production was barely keeping up even before Russia started bombing its factories, has focused so much on getting Western military aid; why Western governments have focused so much on limiting the Russian economy; and why Russian forces have launched so many attacks on Ukrainian cities, degrading Ukrainian industry, even the functioning of its electrical grid, and forcing Ukraine to relocate some air defences from the front to cities far from the battlefield.

All of them, in a sense, are fronts in the war of industrial attrition.

This also has parallels with other wars of this type, for example the Korean Warin which US-led airstrikes devastated North Korean cities in a way not unlike, and often exceeding, Russia’s campaign of attacks in Ukraine.

One of the lessons of these conflicts is that while each side is desperately trying to keep up with the other, they are doing everything they can to rally international support.

This can prolong the war when it favors the aggressor, as happened with US and Saudi Arabian support for the attempt Iraq’s invasion of Iran.

It can help decide the outcome of the war, as was the case in some conflicts during the disintegration of Yugoslaviain which Western support for one side ended up exceeding Russian support for the other.

It can also reshape world politics in a broader sense.

The geopolitical lines drawn by the Korean War, in which the North gained Soviet and Chinese support against the US-backed South, largely still apply 70 years later.

Wars of several decades

“The Yom Kippur War comes to mind,” historian Radchenko said of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, referring to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

The coalition of Arab states that attacked Israel wanted to oust it from the territory it had conquered in previous rounds of fighting and re-establish its regional dominance, just as Moscow wants to bring Ukraine back into its orbit and, more generally, reconstitute in Europe some of the his Power of the Soviet era.

In his speech announcing the invasion, Vladimir PutinRussia’s president, went so far as to describe it as a war to reverse what he considered a historic mistake, amid the breakup of the Soviet Union 30 years earlier, which established Ukraine as an independent state.

This also parallels the Arab coalition’s repeated wars with Israel, dating back to the country’s declaration of independence in 1948, over territory that Arab states rightly considered Palestinian.

The most recent war between Israel and one of those states was in 2006, which is fine 58 years of conflict.

Formal peace with many of these countries has only been declared in recent years and tensions with others remain at a minimum.

This pattern holds true for many of the conventional warfare since WWII:

a conflict over territory and the balance of power that began with the declaration of those modern states and has flared on and off ever since.

Armenia and AzerbaijanFor example, two countries that also emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union have since fought periodic wars, punctuated by long but tense ceasefires.

India and Pakistan they fought their first war a few months after their independence and partition in 1947, which was followed by three more wars, the last one in 1999, and repeated minor conflicts which now remain in a timid nuclear peace.

North Korea and South Korea They reached an armistice in 1953 but remained in a state of technical warfare, with occasional flare-ups and the constant threat of all-out confrontation.

In other words, these conflicts have been going on for six or seven decades.

In many cases, peace talks are minimal or non-existent, so some may drag on longer.

And while the reported attacks may be rare, with what Radchenko calls “active phases“While lasting only a few months, the lulls often require deep international involvement to maintain.

US troops, for example, have garrisoned South Korea for more than 70 years.

Whether this represents the future of Russia and Ukraine is impossible to predict, even though it may already describe their current state.

The seven years leading up to the 2022 Russian invasion were characterized by less intense fighting, with strong Western diplomacy and support for Ukraine to avoid a major conflict.

This model shows that one side rarely beats the other, especially when foreign states are willing to intervene.

And offers another lesson:

Political change within those countries rarely delivers the kind of breakthrough that observers hope will one day lead Moscow to withdraw.

For example, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which lasted a decade, only intensifying with the rise of the reformist leader in 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev.

New wars, old models

The fact that the Russia-Ukraine war appears to conform to an old pattern, rather than charting a new direction in the war, as has been widely expected, may offer wider lessons for the world.

“Strategic Weapons they have not replaced and will not replace armies,” wrote Stephanie Carvin, a Canadian analyst, in an essay on the trajectory of the war that has been widely circulated among pundits.

Only conventional forces can seize territory and hold it, making them the central unit of warfare.

New technologies, such as drones or satellite communications, have not altered this dynamic, nor have new methods such as cyberattacks or media manipulation.

“There is no question that ways of waging war have evolved since the time of Clausewitz with the introduction of new technologies,” Radchenko said, referring to the 18th-century Prussian general credited with modern military theory.

But time and time again, he added, what might at first “be called a ‘revolution’ in military affairs actually unfolds as changes pretty slow“.

But equally, Carvin wrote in his essay:

“Weapons can help bring about a ceasefire, but they cannot by themselves create one lasting and established peace“.

Despite numerous attempts by military powers large and small to develop methods of warfare effective enough to impose their political goals on their adversary, none have yet found a way to evade the difficult task of negotiating a mutually acceptable peace.

But a lesson from the last 80 years of war might be that if states are unable to reach an agreement – ​​perhaps, as is the case with Russia’s attitude towards Ukraine, because one side finds the same independence as the other – even fighting to the point of mutual exhaustion cannot bring about peace.

c.2023 The New York Times Society