That doesn't mean they won't try, and break a few things. I suspect though this war has resulted in most of the assumptions about combined arms manoeuvre to be redundant. A core principal of combined arms was the ability to concentrate forces without being detected. Historically, combined arms depended on massing tanks, infantry, engineers, artillery, and logistics at decisive points.e battlefield has become extraordinarily transparent. Cheap commercial drones, military UAVs, satellites, electronic intelligence, and social media mean it is much harder to concentrate forces without being detected. The Ukrainian military are literally using Uber taxi ride apps to call in artillery strikes. In Ukraine, large formations assembling for an attack are often located within minutes. Precision strike capability has proliferated. Once detected, forces can be attacked by FPV drones costing hundreds of dollars, loitering munitions, precision artillery, rocket systems, attack helicopters, or missiles. The result is that dense armoured formations—the classic image of combined arms manoeuvre—have become highly vulnerable. Drone evolution is so rapid, that in this war, designs have a lifespan of 8 weeks; Western approaches to design and procurement can't keep up with this. Mines have returned on an unprecedented scale. Both sides have laid minefields measured in kilometres rather than hundreds of metres, often reseeded continuously by artillery-delivered scatterable mines. Engineers can breach these obstacles, but doing so under constant drone observation is vastly more difficult than NATO doctrine anticipated. There have been enormous losses of sappers, on both sides, in this war. NATO doctrine depended on these Sappers for break throughs. In the 21st Century, Sappers are true special ops soldiers who cannot be easily replaced. Electronic warfare has transformed the battlespace. Both sides routinely jam GPS, radio communications, drone control frequencies, and data links. Coordinating armour, infantry, artillery, engineers, and aviation—the essence of combined arms—has become significantly more difficult. The was Al Carns' point at Chatham House. Attrition has dominated over manoeuvre. Much of the war has resembled an industrial contest in which artillery, drones, logistics, and production capacity matter at least as much as operational brilliance. Instead of rapid penetrations, gains are often measured in hundreds of metres. But your charge that both sides of incapable of combined arms is fallacious. Ukrainian offensives in Kharkiv Oblast in 2022 and Russian advances in parts of Donetsk Oblast have depended on integrating reconnaissance, artillery, electronic warfare, infantry, armour, engineers, logistics, and increasingly drones. Those drones are a new arm, that the Ukrainian and Russian militaries are learning to use. Western and American militaries have not. The West hasn't fought a peer adversary for 81 years. There are new rules of warfare being developed in this war. We are into the age of "Distributed Combined Arms" or "Drone-Enabled Manoeuvre". The rule book is still being developed. Evidence of the lack of preparation for this drone threat is evidenced from the performance of US and allied forces in the Persian Gulf; I'm not referring to offensive capabilities, but the inability to defend airbases. You need to go back nearly 60 years, to the Tet Offensive, when the US lost significant numbers of aircraft on the ground due to Vietnamese unguided missile fire. The Iranian hits were clearly much more tactical; they focused on tankers and reconnaissance aircraft. The Americans should listen to the Ukrainians more (famously, they dismissed Ukrainian inventiveness, forgetting that in the days of the USSR, Ukraine was the engineering jewel).
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