A Military Learning Malaise

Military operations against Iran, and Iran’s retaliation operations, have shown that there is a systemic learning disorder in western military organisations that we must fix urgently.

In the past fortnight, a British politician visiting Ukraine tweeted from a previously undeclared maintenance site for British-supplied Ukrainian military equipment. As Christopher Miller of the Financial Times remarked, for four years, both Ukraine and Russia have employed simple and widely available geolocation from social media posts to inform and drive their targeting process. As a result, it is likely that the Russians will try to target this location, and more lives might be put at risk. The politician in question has now deleted the original post, but, at a minimum, the site will probably have to be relocated.

The post indicated a concerning lack of learning by a western politician from four years of rapid technological and conceptual development driven by the war in Ukraine. At the same time, a more significant learning shortfall has also arisen in the Middle East.

A recent media report has described how the US Secretary of War briefed members of Congress that ‘Iran’s Shahed attack drones represent a major challenge and US air defences will not be able to intercept them all.’ This is an important admission because it is indicative of two wider trends in warfare that have been evident since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The first trend is the widespread application of autonomous systems that can saturate the battle space, overwhelm traditional defences, and increasingly shape deep operations well behind the frontline.

The second trend, which is perhaps more problematic for western military institutions, is that while Ukraine has been consistently offering to share insights from the war, western politicians and military institutions have been slow to take up this offer.

The past four years, in Ukraine and in the Middle East, have offered many useful insights into 21st-century warfare. From the political to tactical levels, there has been a level of visibility to operations in Ukraine and the Middle East, offering unprecedented insights into the continuities and transformations of war. For example, more than a year ago, Ukraine introduced new interceptors that cost between $3,000 and $5,000 each, and can now take down 70 per cent of Russian Shaheds, which cost ten times as much. This has radically changed the economics of defending against drones, but has yet to appear in western military inventories.

Authoritarian powers, on the other hand, have exploited this learning environment. Iran, Russia, China and North Korea have established an authoritarian learning and adaptation bloc – a 21st-century conflict knowledge exchange – where lessons are shared about battlefield operations, technology, industrial production, coercion, and sanctions busting

But the briefing by Hegseth to Congress about drone defences indicates that western nations appear not to have exploited recent wartime learning opportunities. New modes of strategic strike have emerged, as have saturated drone operations, counter-drone interception and AI-supported decision-making. And despite there being some small examples of the US learning from the battlefields of Ukraine, such as the American version of the Iranian Shahed – the LUCAS, now being employed in Iran – many other potential lessons have been neglected or ignored.

Counter-drone operations are among the obvious lessons unlearned, but there are others concerning industry, mobilisation and cognitive war that are valuable and worthy of greater attention.

Part of the problem is political. The other challenge is context. The war in Ukraine occurs in a different geographic and political context, featuring an adversary with distinct goals and capabilities. Despite this, there are lessons that should have been learned from Ukraine and applied to Operation Epic Fury, but have not. If the operations in the Middle East are made more challenging because of an inability to learn and adapt appropriate lessons, what about the more significant challenges in the Pacific? If western military organisations were too slow to develop counters to obvious and well-understood operational problems in the past four years, what else might they have missed that could hurt them in a potential war against China?

China has been quick to assess lessons from Ukraine and act upon them. Some of its insights include the importance of nuclear posture and coercion, how to manipulate western publics and politicians through cognitive warfare, the centrality of autonomous systems, and the criticality of saturating enemy air, missile and drone defences to overwhelm them in protracted conflict.

A similar process is required among democracies in the Pacific threatened by China. But if allied nations in the Pacific, such as Japan, Australia, the Philippines and America were to conduct a systemic, alliance-wide audit of lessons from Ukraine and rapidly absorb them, how might they do so?

You can read my full piece on this topic, for free, here at Engelsberg Ideas.