Defense News: US Army learns lessons from Ukraine war

Expensive, massive tanks are destroyed by small and cheap loitering munitions. Drones help artillery locate targets. A battlefield is so flooded with sensors that it’s impossible to stay hidden for long.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Army has carefully taken note of these trends. Now those changes are reshaping the service’s plans from acquisition to how to approach formations to reimagining logistics. Already, the Army has rethought its plans to modernize tanks and altering its strategies with drones, Defense News writes.

“The character of war is changing,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the US Army’s annual conference. “It’s changed more in the last couple of years because of the war in Ukraine. And I think it will continue to change at a very rapid pace and we have to have the mindset to change with it.”

Gen. James Rainey, who leads Army Futures Command, the service’s organization in charge of modernizing the force, said the service needs to adapt its artillery strategy based on both “what’s happening in Ukraine” as well as what US Army Pacific requires from conventional fires.

“Everything we’re seeing in Ukraine [is] about the relevance of precision fires, all the emerging technology, but the big killer on the battlefield is conventional artillery, high-explosive artillery,” he said.

The US Army plans to issue a new conventional fires strategy by the end of the year, he added.

The war in Ukraine has also made clear artillery is still critical, said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who previously led US Army Europe. A layered approach to artillery in formations — meaning using towed or mobile systems with different types of munitions that achieve different ranges — is required, he said.

The Army is developing an Extended Range Cannon Artillery system that uses a service-built 58-caliber gun tube mounted on the chassis of a BAE Systems-made Paladin Integrated Management howitzer.

A new artillery strategy could renew the push for rapid procurement of a field-proven 155mm mobile howitzer.

“The broad lesson is that you still need artillery. It is the No. 1 killer on the battlefield, still in this conflict [in Ukraine],” he said.

A fresh take on tanks

The Army in September, after watching loitering munitions destroy tanks in Ukraine and observing both sides struggle to manoeuvre tanks on the battlefield, opted to scrap its upgrade plan for the M1 Abrams tank and instead pursue a new variant: the M1E3.

The Abrams tank “can no longer grow its capabilities without adding weight, and we need to reduce its logistical footprint,” Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the Army’s program executive officer for ground combat systems, said in a statement at the time. “The war in Ukraine has highlighted a critical need for integrated protection for soldiers, built from within instead of adding on.”

Part of the new effort will take weight off the tank, increasing its mobility and sustainability. Today, if a tank breaks or gets hit in combat, it requires two recovery vehicles to pull it out of the fight. Reducing the tank’s weight would help, Dean said.

The new design is also intended to integrate active protection capability, including protection from attacks to the roof from loitering munitions and drones.

Moving in minutes

The Army has long set up elaborate command posts on the battlefield, putting up climate-controlled tents equipped with generators. The service has said these tactical operations centres must get smaller, both in size and in electromagnetic signature.

But the war in Ukraine has put more pressure on the service to act.

“Gone are the days where you’re setting up a whole [tactical operations center]. And two hours is too much time,” George said. “We need to be able to move in minutes. We need to be able to command and control on the move.”

He noted the war has also proven the need for open architecture that is mobile and can be rapidly updated.

Ukraine has taught the Army it is going to have to learn how to “fight under constant observation of commercially available space, the electromagnetic spectrum, social media,” Rainey said. “We are going to have to figure out how to fight when the enemy’s going to know where we are or prevent him; so concealment, deception, camouflage, constantly good tactics.”

Preparing for the future

The war in Ukraine has, according to service leaders, validated many of the Army’s modernization priorities, laid out a little over five years ago.

The Army was already focused on countering unmanned aircraft systems because of operations in the Middle East and had set up a joint office at the Pentagon. The use of drones on the battlefield in Ukraine has accelerated efforts to come up with a layered approach to defeating the systems, both big and small.

“The scale of [drones on the battlefield] has been sort of astonishing and it has reinvigorated this focus on the lowest sort of short-range air defenses that would be needed for that,” Stacie Pettyjohn, a defence analyst at the Center for a New American Security, told Defense News.

Having the ability to see or sense as much as possible at all times, is another way the Army is changing because of Ukraine. “There’s a lot of interest in drones to be able to provide us with [persistent sensing],” Wormuth told Defense News. “But we’re going to have a layered approach to that ... we’re investing in the [High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System], fixed-wing platform. ... I think you’ll see aerostats.”

Drawing from Ukraine, “there’s no shortage of observations that we should think about,” Rainey said. And the Army is “committed to turning those observations genuinely into lessons learned.”