The American Department of Defense – which President Donald Trump prefers to describe as “war” – has announced to European countries that they will have to assume “the majority of NATO’s conventional defensive capabilities” on their territory from 2027. Washington’s new foreign doctrine, published on December 5 and which advocates “the restoration of strategic balance with Russia”, caused a profound shock in a Europe accustomed to military support from the United States. The prospect of a clash in Eastern Europe is felt on both sides of the border. “Russia does not intend to go to war against Europe, but if the EU wishes, it is ready now,” President Vladimir Putin warned in early December. The reality, according to military experts on both sides, is that neither Europe – without the support of the United States – nor Russia are today ready to prevail in a hypothetical conflict.
This new feeling of loneliness forces Europe to learn some lessons from the most important conflict taking place on its soil since the Second World War. The main conclusion is that the key is to achieve air superiority to repel the enemy. Without aviation, battle tanks will be exhausted in the face of waves of drones.
Since Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the war has changed dramatically. Fewer and fewer battle tanks are visible on the front. Videos of multi-ton turrets jumping through the air have been replaced on social media by drones hitting motorcycles and bicycles. The expensive Russian T-14 Armata has never been deployed to the front. The Western Leopard and the M1 Abrams arrived late and in small numbers in a war which today has nothing to do with 2022 and 2023.
Military experts from Russia and NATO are now wondering whether it makes sense to invest billions in defenseless weapons against drones hundreds of times cheaper.
Russian military Telegram channels occasionally publish the annihilation of some of their armored columns in senseless attacks. In October, a battalion of 22 tanks and armored personnel carriers set out, protected from bad weather, from a forest towards the villages of Volodimirivka and Sakhove. A long journey of several kilometers during which Ukrainian drones and guided artillery destroyed nine Russian vehicles and damaged four others. It was the fourth failed mechanized assault on the Kremlin in a month.
From now on, the troops are scattered in small groups along the front and the real rearguard begins 50 kilometers behind, and no longer a dozen as before. Between the two is the destruction zone (“death zone”), an area approximately 15 kilometers deep where a cloud of enemy drones stalks anything that moves, including the vehicles of civilians, military personnel and journalists. And above all, the horror, the contact line, a gray zone about three kilometers wide riddled with mines, corpses and wounded people who cannot be extracted alive.
“Armed conflict will become a battle for air superiority using drones,” say former Russian Chief of Staff Yuri Baluyevski and Defense Ministry adviser Ruslan Pukhov in an essay where they warn that total digitalization of the battlefield – instantaneous communication between the soldier, robotic weapons and the command center – and artificial intelligence will be decisive in creating “attack and defense systems of density and efficiency colossal” in the face of current military masses.
The idea, presented in broad terms, is to detect and suppress enemy fire in a minute or a few. And once defenseless, hammer the rival. The fastest team wins.
The temptation to launch human waves against the enemy is doomed to failure, Pukhov says in a telephone conversation: “Any accumulation of forces is impossible; it is immediately destroyed upon discovery. In addition to drones, there is also artillery guided and corrected by drones.”
The Ukrainian and Russian militaries today use commercial Starlink satellites and mobile phone cards to connect their drones, but Baluyevski and Pukhov say that won’t be enough in a future war. “In the medium term, Russia will lag behind leading countries in technological development. This problem must be addressed immediately,” they warn.
a bad lesson
Russia plans to double its production of T-90M main battle tanks over the next four years and plans to manufacture and upgrade 1,118 tanks of all types between 2027 and 2029, according to leaked documents. For their part, the United States presented a new variant of the M1 Abrams for a scenario saturated with drones, the M1E3. And Europe announced Project MARTE, its new main battle tank.
In heaven the race is very different. In addition to its military satellites, Washington has more than 7,800 commercial Starlink devices. The second largest international network is the European Eutelsat network, with more than 650 devices. Russia, for its part, hopes to have 292 Rassvet units deployed by 2030.
“Making tanks is wasting money. It’s worse than a crime, it’s a mistake,” says Pukhov. For the expert, “the transparency of the battlefield and the designation of objectives in real time (by drones and guided artillery) eliminate direct fire and replace it with indirect fire”.
Spanish Admiral Juan Rodríguez Garat departs from the conclusions of Pujov and the former Russian chief of staff. “The war in Ukraine, seen from the West, is an anomaly: two powerful armies clash on the ground without either being able to take advantage of its air forces,” this retired soldier explains to the newspaper.
“With the absence of air power – which is unthinkable in the Atlantic Alliance – and mechanized weapons neutralized by drones, what we see today in Ukraine is a struggle that is going nowhere,” adds Garat.
According to the admiral, “if the war in Ukraine demonstrates anything, it is that without tanks, there is no mobility possible on the land front,” and he adds that NATO is not considering abandoning armored vehicles, “but rather protecting them from artillery and especially from low-cost drones.”
Pukhov admits that a powerful air force could significantly influence the course of this hypothetical war, “but today only one country has such an air force: the United States.”
According to the Russian expert, Europe would not be able to impose this superiority if Washington withdrew: “It is unlikely that a war with American air superiority will preserve the armored columns, but it will increase the depth and isolation of the combat zone (…) This will generate a general fire superiority which will partially neutralize the effect of the drones and allow the front to advance. »
Outdated anti-aircraft systems
Russia did not achieve air superiority over Ukraine at the time of launching its offensive, but Israeli and American bombing of Iran showed that anti-aircraft systems can still be overwhelmed.
Beyond the alleged superiority of the American F-35 stealth fighter over the Russian Su-57, some Western experts point out an essential strategic difference: Israeli doctrine prioritizes the acquisition of air superiority to continue bombing later, while Russia submits its air force to support the plans of the land army.
Kendall Ward and Alexander Palmer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) analyzed both conflicts and concluded that Israeli intelligence played a key role in locating rival mobile anti-aircraft systems and decapitating the Israeli high command in the initial attacks.
“NATO, faced with the (distant) possibility of a future Russian military campaign against its eastern flank, must learn from Israel’s success and Russia’s failure,” Shapiro warns in his report.
The drone nightmare
Oleshki, taken by the Russians, is on the opposite bank of Kherson, controlled by the Ukrainians. There is a distance of five kilometers between the two cities. “These birds (the drones) crush everything they cross, my brother,” a Russian soldier told the newspaper.
“Ukraine has a lot to teach its allies,” William Courtney, a research associate at the Rand Center, added by email. “There are several options for low-cost per-shot countermeasures against drones. The development of interceptor drones is a nascent area and further advancements are likely to come,” the expert adds.
For his part, Garat emphasizes that the most important thing now is to prepare the production lines in Europe. “It makes no sense to accumulate commercial devices, what is needed is to develop the industrial capacity to design and build them quickly when they are needed,” he emphasizes.
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