There's a lot of goodness in this piece by Steve Biddle. It's balanced, and well written, pouring cold water over some of the tech fetishism, and tendentious takes that have proliferated since this war began. A few comments. 1/ warontherocks.com/2022/11/ukrain…
From my point of view most technology is offense-defense agnostic, and this is largely a moribund lens for viewing war. I agree with Biddle that force employment is much more deterministic, but I would add force design, which has a structural effect on employment. 2/
This war reveals that good theory + capability doesn't translate into successful practice when you've not made the organizational adaptations, matured the concepts, or trained the force to effect them. All of this can come apart quickly when a military tries to scale. 3/
Hence the issue is not just that force employment is deterministic, but the essential question is can you employ at scale, or will it rapidly fall apart because the force is highly uneven, the organizational capacity and the experience is simply not there. 4/
Where I differ with the piece is on the implications for offensive maneuver, because the argument comes off as tautological: offensive maneuver is possible where it is easy. What enabled it in Ukraine was attrition, as this has largely been a war of attrition. 5/
So is maneuver dead? Of course not. Neither is the tank, or much of anything else really. Though we should take care generalizing lessons from this war, it highlights attrition as a defining feature of conventional wars, and how difficult it is to escape it.
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