Western heavy armor is proving ineffective in the high-intensity battlefield of the Ukraine-Russia war.
That was the conclusion reached by war analysts and Ukrainian fighters with whom The Wall Street Journal spoke. They said the modern Western weapons systems that rolled over militaries in places like Iraq and Afghanistan were wanting in a full-scale war against Russia.
“A lot of Western armor doesn’t work here because it had been created not for an all-out war but for conflicts of low or medium intensity. If you throw it into a mass offensive, it just doesn’t perform,” said Taras Chmut, director of the pro-Ukraine fundraising operation Come Back Alive, per the WSJ.
The battlefield in Ukraine has been constantly evolving over the last 19 months, with new weapons and tactics prompting adaptations on the part of both belligerents.
“Nothing stands firm,” explained the commander of the Ukrainian Navy, Vice Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa, per the WSJ. “War is the time when technology develops. Every operation is different, and if you repeat it the same way, it would make no sense because the enemy already has an antidote.”
Ukraine’s Western backers acknowledged that they are playing catch-up when it comes to producing the military equipment Ukraine claims it needs to combat Russia’s military effectively.
“We have a lot of lessons to learn. One is that quantity is a quality of its own,” said Maj. Gen. Christian Freuding, head of Ukraine operations at the German Ministry of Defense, per the WSJ. “You need numbers, you need force numbers. In the West, we have reduced our military, we have reduced our stocks. But quantity matters, mass matters.”
The argument for favoring quantity over quality applies especially to expensive main battle tanks like the Abrams, which can cost tens of millions of dollars each. Tank-on-tank battles accounted for only 5% of destroyed tanks in the current war. In contrast, almost all the other tanks were lost to much less expensive — and more numerous — mines, artillery, antitank missiles, and drones, according to the WSJ.
Another WSJ article noted that even though the effectiveness of expensive battle tanks has been exposed, their presence on the battlefield has significant symbolic importance when it comes to morale.
Their effectiveness can be maximized as long as they are carefully deployed in very specific types of operations.
“They should be used in a very tailored way for very specific, well-crafted operations because if they are used at the front line and just in a combined arms fight, they will not live very long on the battlefield,” said Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, per the WSJ.
