Learning from the War in Ukraine

Wars, as destructive as they are, are also learning opportunities

A central responsibility for the most senior leaders in any military, or national security, institution is providing the incentives for innovation during peace time, so that the good ideas, appropriate organisations and leading-edge technology can be combined to provide an advantage over adversaries in war. This, in turn, requires a cultural predisposition to learning and sharing lessons widely, accepting failure as an opportunity to learn, and a well-honed understanding of risk.

In his superb book, The Culture of Military Innovation, Dima Adamsky writes that:

In the future, both state and non-state actors will continue to develop military knowledge, and security experts will continue to uncover foreign military innovations. In each case there will be a need to figure out the tools of war (hardware) and anticipate their application (software). The task with regard to “software” will be much more demanding, and a cultural approach will be indispensable for it.

War, as destructive as it is, is also a learning opportunity for military institutions. But the study of learning in war is not as simple of drawing a direct line from learning to battlefield prowess. As Dr Aimee Fox writes in her terrific study of British Army learning in the First World War, Learning to Fight:

Organisations face a series of difficult tasks: they have to simultaneously acquire and assimilate new knowledge, whilst leveraging existing knowledge. They have to try and identify good ideas over bad ones. They also have to negotiate inherent frictions, such as trust, relevance, and motivation (or lack thereof).

Therefore, learning in war is not as simple as it may seem. While the old saw of ‘adapt or die’ has its place, large scale collection, assessment, sharing and absorption of lessons is very difficult, especially when one considers all the other challenges and demands placed on military institutions that are concurrently in the midst of fighting, planning for the next fight, bringing in new members while steadily losing others to death, wounds and sickness.

But, as hard as it is, it is even harder to win if an institution lacks a learning culture or has developed a suboptimal one.

This article is an examination of how national leaders, as well as contemporary military and national security institutions, can learn from different conflicts including the war in Ukraine, and apply those lessons to their own national security and military endeavours.

Over the course of the war in Ukraine, spawned in February 2022 by Russia’s invasion, there has been a profusion of articles that describe lists of lessons from the Russo-Ukraine War. Some of these, from experts on war, the military, strategy and national security affairs, are well informed and cogently argued.

Some articles or social media feeds, on the other hand, are biased, poorly structured, contain Russian misinformation or just plain wrong. This includes premature declarations such as ‘the death of (insert your least favourite military equipment here)’. They provide nothing other than a guide for what not to do when observing and learning from military endeavours.

More recently however, there have been several high-quality longer reports exploring the war and providing evidence-based observations that might be used to inform current military modernisation activities. The aim of this article is to explore the process of learning in war, and to list some of the better reports exploring initial observations from the war in Ukraine.

Learning in War

Learning from war is a serious business that can have profound outcomes for military organisations in future conflicts. The lives of our future service personnel literally hang on how well we learn, and adapt, from our observations of current wars.

The Ukrainians, throughout this war, have demonstrated an edge over the Russians in their military learning culture. This learning culture, willingness to take risk and innovate, and the capacity to rapidly absorb new technologies (such as HIMARS or HARM missiles) and integrate them into their operations, clearly did not emerge on 24 February.

The Ukrainians learned from Russian operations in Ukraine in 2014, and their subsequent military operations in eastern Ukraine. This provided a legacy capacity for learning and adaptation upon which Ukrainian Armed Forces innovation and improvements in military effectiveness have been based since February this year.

The Russians also brought with them a legacy learning culture, although it appears to be inferior to the Ukrainian model. This issue was covered in the recent report from the Royal United Services Institution, which notes that:

A further fratricidal issue is the culture of reporting within the Russian military. Those who fail are usually replaced or threatened with punishment. Far from incentivising success, this often leads to dishonest reporting in which the blame for failure is transferred onto others. This…obscures the actual operational problems that must be solved. These only become apparent when they can no longer be concealed, slowing the learning of lessons.

The Russians clearly did learn from their operations in places such as Chechnya and Syria. However, whether these were the right lessons, or whether lessons have been retained by the Russian military institution, might be questioned. It will be a topic for much research in the wake of this war.

However, the Russians appear to have assumed they would be fighting the same Ukrainian Army that existed in 2014. Thus, the Russian Army’s learning culture before the war was flawed. Consequently, they had a poor foundation for learning and adapting once the war began.

In examining how military institutions can learn from the Russo-Ukraine War, I would propose that there are some guidelines that might be useful in a professional, strategic approach to learning and adaptation.

A foundational issue is that of purpose. Why should military organisations look at lessons from war in general, and this one in particular? The answer is that the world is constantly changing. And, rather than constantly making your own mistakes in adapting to change, a clever institution should learn from the mistakes of others.

As Barno and Bensahel argue in Adaptation Under Fire, this process of learning is easier to talk about in principle than to achieve in practice however. Bureaucratic resistance, battlefield friction & the enemy’s adaptations all make it harder. But it is possible to learn and change, as historically successful military forces show.

A second consideration in learning is to distinguish between lessons that are specific to this particular war, and those that are more general in nature. This is hard because it is only in retrospect such a judgement can generally be made. Consequently, at this point in the war (and given our limited insights into Ukrainian military strategy and force generation), almost all our observations appear to have wider – or general – utility. These include leadership, combined arms, air-land integration, info war and logistics.

A third consideration for exploring military learning and lessons from this war is the level of lessons being observed. In their superb three-book series on learning and military effectiveness, Williamson Murray and Allan Millet propose a four layered approach – political, strategic, operational, and tactical. In making the most of the opportunity to learn from the Russo-Ukrainian War, military institutions, operational analysts and scholars will need to invest in each of these four levels to gain a full view of the war and understand how each level interacted with (and changed) activities in the other layers.

A fourth issue in learning from the war in Ukraine is that it provides the opportunity to identify both solutions (from either side) as well as future challenges for which there no current solutions. This is important. A strategic learning process emerging from this war must not only be about copying what the eventual victor did. Military institutions and strategists will have to look deeper for other challenges that aren’t obvious or that neither side may have produced a robust solution for.

A final consideration in collecting, analysing, disseminating and absorbing the lessons from this war is understanding the difference between ‘lessons’ and ‘lessons learned’. It is one matter to make observations. It is quite another to affect change in a military (or other government) institution based on those lessons.

The US Army has good definitions for both. A lesson is “knowledge or understanding gained by experience. Successes and failures are both considered sources of lessons.” A lesson learned is “when you can measure a change in behaviour.” Read more on this particular consideration here.

There is a very competitive learning environment in Ukraine. Both sides, in different ways and utilising different institutional cultures, constantly search for tactical, operational and strategic advantage. It is a continuous adaptation battle and will be one of the key determinants of who eventually wins this war.

With this as context, I now wish to explore some of the better observations from the war in Ukraine. While there is a long way to go in this war, these reports provide useful intellectual foundations for military institutions to inform their ongoing modernisation efforts and preparation for future conflicts.

I would add that this is by no means a comprehensive list.

Reports on Initial Observations of the War in Ukraine

The November 2022 report from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) is probably the best report on Ukraine war observations released thus far. It has a particular focus on Russian operations and the integration of different force elements. The report’s critiques of Ukrainian operations are limited however, noting the requirement for operational security. That said, it is a very good report on initial observations of the war.

With a good narrative on each side’s preparations for the war, as well as a chronology of the war’s first five months, it is a must read for those interested in the observations of Ukrainian and Russian military effectiveness from the tactical to the strategic level.

One lesser-known series of reports is from the AustralianArmy Research Centre. In a three-part series, these reports look at the context of the war, and observations from its conduct.

And while this is not a long report, the source makes it worthy of perusing. In June this year, the Secretary of the US Army discussed five key lessons from Ukraine.

The war in the air over Ukraine is worthy of additional study. There has been a lot going on with both crewed and uncrewed systems, missiles, and Ukraine’s integrated air and missile defence system. One of the better studies on this topic is this report from RUSI.

This report on air warfare, as well as space operations, from the Atlantic Council is also very comprehensive.

Cyber operations have been described by some as that dog that hasn’t barked in Ukraine. This is probably an unfair assessment – there have been cyber operations on both sides. But they are not as obvious or transparent as other aspects of the war, as this report from Lawfare notes.

In June this year, Microsoft issued a report on the early lessons of cyber from the war in Ukraine. It is a good read, although should be read in conjunction with other views of the cyber war such as those from Wired Magazine, Carnegie Endowment and The Economist, among others.

Finally, information warfare. This war has seen widespread influence operations from both sides. It has also seen a Cambrian explosion in civil influence operations, open-source mapping and assessment, and intelligence analysis. Recently, this speech on open source intelligence contained good insights that provide a foundation for how military and private intelligence capabilities might better collaborate in future.

This discussion from the Center for Strategic and International Studies explores a range of observations on information warfare and influence operations drawn from the war in Ukraine. The link is a transcript, but a video of the discussion is also available.

This is just a selection of what I think are some of the better reports, released up until this point. There will be many more that I am not aware of, and reports will continue to be published in the coming weeks and months. This is good.

But in reviewing the many observations made of this war so far, there are two things to keep in mind. First, events in the coming months might change the context of these current observations. And second, even with these observations, not all military innovation described in observations and lessons reports is good.

Failed Innovation Matters Too

We must ensure that institutional processes are informed by examples of failed lessons, failed adaptation and failed ‘lessons learned’ processes. Examples of failed reform processes can be just as informative as successful adaptations.

Examples in this war might include the Russian Battalion Tactical Group construct, or Russian failure to sufficiently adapt its strike plans early in the war because the Ukrainians moved equipment, stores and aircraft just before 24 February. As the November RUSI report notes:

It took considerable time for Russian commanders to understand what was happening, to assert control over their units, or to adapt their tactics.

Further study will unearth many other examples from both sides.

Earlier this year, Kendrick Kuo explored how military innovation can also hurt military effectiveness. It is a long read but contains many useful lessons for observing military affairs and drawing lessons on innovation and adaptation.  Importantly, Kuo notes that:

Military innovation can be healthy insofar as it realigns military means with political ends. But ensuring the proper balance and integration of new and traditional capabilities involves calibrating the appropriate level of radicalness in an innovation process for an uncertain strategic landscape.

Failed adaptation is also explored by David Barno and Nora Bensahel in Adaptation Under Fire, including the World War Two example of US Army supplemental armour in 1944-1945. They note the connection between tactical and institutional adaptation, and that some tactical problems cannot be overcome by tactical learning and adaptation. Institutional adaptation is needed.

But even learning and adaptation at this institutional level wasn’t always possible. Barno and Bensahel examine the development of the US Army’s main tank in the war, the M4 Sherman. They describe how:

The US Army in World War II stubbornly clung to its pre-war views about how to employ tanks long after they should have been demolished by the experience of combat. Furthermore, infighting among different parts of the army’s bureaucracy effectively stonewalled any new tank development during the entire war.

This is an example of a failure in the institutional learning system. But it also provides insights that might be used by a clever institution to use an adversary’s cultural predispositions against them and induce failure in an enemy lessons and learning system.

Learning for the Next War

Many nations are watching this war closely with an eye to their own success in future warfare. In learning from this war, western military institutions will need to invest in – and apply – collection, analysis, dissemination, and adaptation processes. Importantly, as General Don Starry described in his classic 1983 article in Military Review called “To Change an Army”, effectively learning the lessons from this war will require leadership from the top.

It must be a systemic undertaking, and must have leadership, incentives, and the rapid collection, processing of observations into lessons and then lessons learned. It must be deeply embedded in the culture of an organization. For as Dr Aimee Fox-Godden writes in Learning to Fight:

Culture determines how an organization responds to change. For the Army of the First World War, it determined how it identified lessons, how it innovated, and ultimately, how it learned to fight.

As the war in Ukraine continues, both sides are adapting based on battlefield learning. Their interactions with each other, support from other nations, as well as new technologies and ideas shape their learning and adaptation.

One final point. Learning is ultimately a human process. Whether it is individuals or different sized teams, it is well-led humans with a sense of purpose who drive innovation and military adaptation. We are only at the very beginning of learning from how people have responded to the profound challenges of this war, developed new solutions and adapted their institutions.

But many clever military institutions - including our potential future adversaries - are watching, assessing and adapting. The success of the Ukrainians, and other Western military forces in future, will be shaped by how effective their learning cultures are.

*******

Picture credits: Ukrainian Armed Forces (via @DefenceU and @TDF_UA)

*******