The tank is no longer the king of the battlefield.
In Finland, 18 miles from Russia, NATO watched Leopard 2 tanks get “destroyed” by anti-tank teams, drones and artillery in a simulated war game.
This is Ukraine’s lesson becoming NATO doctrine — The Telegraph. 1/
Russia has lost 11,974 tanks and almost 25,000 armored vehicles. Ukraine has lost around 5,700 tanks and armored vehicles to drones, mines and missiles.
Armor still matters, but alone it dies fast. 2/
In Ukraine, drones reportedly account for more than 90% of battlefield casualties, mostly tanks and armored vehicles.
A cheap drone can now find, track and help destroy a platform worth millions. 3/
Russia is learning from Ukraine faster than many European armies are rearming. Latvia’s military chief warned Moscow could exploit Europe’s slow pace and threaten the Baltics by 2028. 4/
Finland is now one of NATO’s most important laboratories.
It has an 830-mile border with Russia, forests, narrow roads and terrain where tanks can be trapped, ambushed and destroyed.
This is where NATO is rehearsing a possible future war. 5/
Russia is also rebuilding near Finland.
Petrozavodsk, about 100 miles from the border, is being revived as a military site. Finnish intelligence says after Ukraine, Russia’s military development will clearly look toward Finland. 6/
NATO’s answer is a new eastern flank deterrence line from Finland to Romania.
The idea is simple: use drones, AI-enabled targeting and autonomous systems to turn the border into a kill zone for Russian troops and vehicles. 7/
But Europe has a scale problem.
The British Army has around 6,000 drones. In a war with Russia, that stockpile could be gone within a week.
Modern war consumes drones like ammunition. NATO needs factories, not boutique procurement. 8/
Tanks must become part of a larger system: drones, infantry, artillery, electronic warfare, camouflage, AI targeting and mass production.
Ukraine already proved this. NATO is trying to catch up. 9X
Ukraine’s 20-somethings are reshaping its war machine and displacing a Soviet-era old guard in defense.
A Defense Ministry staffer in her early 20s found Denmark had earmarked the wrong shells for Ukraine and secured 15,000 long-range rounds, NYT. 1/
The staffer works under Oleksii Antoniuk, 24, deputy head of the ministry’s cooperation department.
Oleksii: “If not for her, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Young Ukrainians under 30 are gradually displacing a Soviet-era old guard in defense. 2/
The shift runs through Ukraine’s war machine.
Twentysomething engineers design drones, young entrepreneurs turn prototypes into production lines, and recent graduates at the Defense Ministry cut red tape to speed weapons to the front. 3/
Applebaum: Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 partly as a direct challenge to NATO and the United States.
Moscow wanted to prove there was no Western alliance, that Ukraine was not a real country, and that Europe and America would not come to its defense. 1/
Applebaum: Russia wanted to show that it alone was the sovereign power in Eastern Europe and would decide what happened there.
Instead, it was surprised: the United States and a united Europe pulled together and proved that a democratic world still exists. 2/
Applebaum: Negotiations will become possible only when Russia decides to stop fighting and accepts that it cannot achieve its main goal—the destruction of Ukraine as a nation.
Russia has not reached that point. Putin has never withdrawn that objective. 3/
Applebaum: The war with Iran was clearly a war of choice. Israel had proposed this kind of action to previous US presidents, and they declined.
They understood the immediate danger to international shipping and especially to the oil and gas industries. 1/
Applebaum: Trump now appears to regret the war, or at least has no interest in continuing it.
He is seeking an agreement that could resemble — or even be slightly worse than — the Obama-era deal, while the claim that Iran was about to get a bomb does not add up. 2/
Applebaum: Trump failed to account for Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz or retaliating against Gulf states, and then expressed surprise.
Yet anyone who had studied a war with Iran over the past two decades had already identified both risks as obvious possibilities. 3/
Applebaum: Trump’s relationship with Erdoğan grows out of his business dealings in Turkey.
He invested there, believes those investments went well, and his family company still has interests there — or could. He sees the world in personal, transactional terms. 1/
Applebaum: Trump does not think like a traditional American president representing US interests, the Western alliance, or the democratic world.
He asks what is good for him personally. He likes Erdoğan, and that is the simplest way to understand their closeness. 2/
Applebaum: Trump states his personal view and assumes that it therefore becomes the policy of the United States.
But the American system is more complicated than the president’s preferences: Congress may still restrain the weapons sales he wants to make to Turkey. 3X