The hubris of Western analysts is sometimes depressing. Ukraine is sometimes asked to do not just more, but something that is beyond the realm of understanding of what a modern battlefield is.

 The hubris of Western analysts is sometimes depressing. Ukraine is sometimes asked to do not just more, but something that is beyond the realm of understanding of what a modern battlefield is.

The last war on such a scale as today was the Doomsday War. Only it happened 50 years ago. It will be exactly 50 years this fall. No other war is even close in scale, except the Iran-Iraq war, but there were roughly equal armies, both in numbers and in terms of technical equipment.

The Doomsday War is similar to the war in Ukraine in that the Israeli army faced a larger and more technically equipped enemy. And because of the advanced SAM systems that Egypt and Syria had, the Israeli army held back the enemy onslaught and counterattacked at the first stage of the war without having air superiority.

And the very first large-scale tank counterattack by the Israelis ended in collapse.

The first and last thing that dramatically differentiates these wars is the time frame. The Doomsday War was relatively short-lived. But Israel also had a War of Attrition that lasted three years and in many ways had the characteristics of today's war. There were artillery duels, infantry raids, the use of aircraft and tanks, and appreciable casualties. The only difference is that the front was static.

But the War of Attrition was even earlier than the Doomsday War. That is, no one has fought a conventional war on this scale for half a century. There's just no experience. None at all. Over these 50 years, the means of communication, detection, all sorts of sensors and other things have changed and advanced so much that much of that experience is no longer relevant.

The Doomsday War was also the first war where UAVs were used on a relatively large scale. Well, how large-scale - several dozens of reconnaissance UAV sorties during the entire war.

Today, UAVs make dozens and sometimes hundreds of sorties a day. And in total, there are thousands of them along the front. And no one knows how to use these UAVs accurately and optimally. At platoon level? Company? Battalion? Autonomously or not? Do we rely on FPV or not? What do we do when the weather is bad? What about E.E.B.S.?

And such questions are endless.

Drones today are like tanks at the beginning of their emergence. It seems to be formidable, and drives, and shoots, and even somewhere helps to break through the enemy's defensive positions, but the devil can't figure out how to develop them further. Create entire tank divisions or give tanks to infantry? Bet on heavy tanks or on light and fast tanks? Is a tank a support or a breakthrough weapon?

These were the questions that military men were asking themselves a hundred years ago, until the Germans came up with the best and most effective tactics and concept of using tanks for that time.

The same thing is happening with drones today. UAVs are flying and helping fighters, but exactly how to use these old-new weapons in the most optimal way, no one knows. Everything in this war is being done for the first time.

This war is not a war of ghosts of the past, even though they keep trying to relegate it to World War I and its trenches. This war raises a lot of questions that have not yet been answered. It is wrong to evaluate this war by reproaching the Ukrainians for the fact that they, for example, do not always succeed in general military combat.

Maybe we should look at these things differently? For example, why do they succeed in other aspects? For example, counter-battery combat.

Could it be due to the new realm of ubiquitous drones? And due to the fact that the use of drones on such a scale has not yet been conceptualized by anyone, so it is not clear when something somewhere, albeit in spite of, but succeeds. Maybe, instead of looking for flaws in the Ukrainian defenders, we should pay attention to those aspects that are not yet fully understood, but still work, pay attention to them and try to strengthen them, thus giving Ukrainian soldiers confidence in their fight.

- Yigal Levin

 (https://focus.ua/voennye-novosti/581667-50-let-ne-bylo-takoy-voyny-polveka-spustya-ukraina-perezhivaet-svoy-sudnyy-den)@yigal_levin

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