In the 2,500 years since Herodotus delivered the first known written military history, a page-turner on the Persian wars, strategists have been busily studying conflict — not least to help their own states avoid “fighting the last war”. Just as the Napoleonic wars influenced tactics in the American civil war, so Europeans observed its killing fields and so on.
More recently, the Pentagon was obsessed for two decades by very different perceived lessons of Vietnam and the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Now it is the turn of Ukraine to come under the microscope — and not just for western militaries. What, if anything, can this conflict teach us about the future of war? And will generals watching from the sidelines absorb the right lessons anyway?
On the face of it, the fighting in Ukraine suggests that we have learnt little in the past 100 years. As in Flanders from 1914 to 1918, this is a war now largely fought in trenches and dictated by artillery. “Every soldier has concussion symptoms,” Kseniia Voznitsyna, a neurologist in charge of the Veterans Mental Health and Rehabilitation Centre in Kyiv told me this autumn.
But this is also a high-tech war as well as a trench war. Just as the first world war was revolutionised by the aeroplane, now it is the turn of humble drones — though it remains to be seen whether a new weapons system will play the game-changing role that the tank did in 1917. For now the conflict has, depressingly, descended into a Western Front-style slugfest.
Yet despite an outbreak of nervousness among Kyiv’s allies over the course of the war, military history suggests that the world should be wary of jumping to conclusions about what happens next.
In the 22 months since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion, there have been four distinct chapters: Ukraine’s heroic blunting of the Russian advance; last autumn’s Ukrainian recovery of territory in the south and east; Russia’s pivot to a war of attrition; and Ukraine’s counteroffensive, from the high hopes of early summer to disappointment over its minuscule gains.
It may be that this fourth phase proves the telling one, and will lead to settlement talks. But just about every war of note has had ebbs and flows. The Korean war — sometimes cited as an analogy to how the war in Ukraine could morph into a frozen conflict — had several dramatic twists before the final course became clear.
Such lessons are at the heart of two new books by acclaimed strategists who seek to shed light on the undercurrents of the war in Ukraine, the innovations it has spawned and the future of warfare.
Conflict, by the decorated US general David Petraeus and British historian Andrew Roberts, charts just about every war fought in Europe, the Middle East and Asia since the defeat of the Nazis. The authors’ main contention is that “exceptional strategic leadership is the one absolute pre-requisite for success.” This leads directly to Vladimir Putin, whose hubris and lack of clarity over his initial war aims echo faulty decision-making over Vietnam and Iraq.
Underpinning their compendious narrative is a quote from the 19th-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, whose unfinished work On War is seminal: “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish . . . the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to make it into, something that is alien to its nature.”
Conflict was written before Hamas’s murderous attack on Israel on October 7, which killed some 1,200 people. But the chapter on the 2005 counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq, authored by Petraeus — who was commander of US-led forces there — has all the more force in light of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza and its bid to eliminate Hamas, which has come at a cost of some 15,000 lives so far, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave.
“The surge of ideas”, Petraeus writes, “would prove even more important than the surge of forces.” He also notes that killing the head of an insurgent group invariably does not lead to its collapse: “There are always subordinate leaders ready to fill the void.”
Petraeus’s experiences in Afghanistan, where he also commanded US-led forces, have resonance for Russian forces in Ukraine — not least in how much politicians can become divorced from the situation on the ground. He tells of how, at a time when Washington was pinning its hopes on Kabul taking responsibility for security, one US special forces officer emailed him a damning message from an Afghan village. “Sir, I need to tell you there is no government of Afghanistan here,” the major wrote. “The district center is seven kilometers away but it might as well be seven thousand.”
As it happens, Petraeus clearly believes the Biden administration should not have pulled troops out in August 2021, arguing that the presence of international forces had stabilised Afghanistan. The withdrawal is widely thought to have emboldened Putin in his belief that Washington had lost heart for international entanglements — and so repeat the mistake that Stalin made in May 1950 when he told Mao that America was not ready for a big war over Korea.
As for lessons for the future, Petraeus and Roberts believe that generals around the world are busily adjusting their battle plans after studying events in Ukraine. Russia’s success in withstanding Ukraine’s counteroffensive has, they suggest, led Nato to rethink its strategy in the event of war with Moscow. Nato will be considering a “hedgehog” defensive approach, they believe, assuming that “manoeuvre” — as displayed by the US-led forces in the Gulf war and at the start of the Iraq war — is “extremely difficult” in an age of hyper-accurate drone-guided artillery. China’s generals, meanwhile, will see events in Ukraine as a cautionary tale for would-be attackers as they war-game scenarios over Taiwan.
More broadly, the co-authors see the war as a reminder of the factors that have affected commanders for millennia — from the whims of political leadership to the arithmetic of logistics.
On this point, the distinguished military historian Sir Lawrence Freedman clearly agrees. His latest book, Modern Warfare, is an excoriating dissection of Putin’s poorly planned, plodding offensive of February 2022.
In just 168 pages, Freedman coolly appraises the course of the war so far. As of this autumn, he writes, it had become “a test of endurance”. He rightly reminds the reader of the importance of logistics, of creating a “war economy”, focused on the production of arms, and for Ukraine of its supporters keeping it supplied with equipment and ammunition.
The provision of these last is up in the air amid wrenching debates on Capitol Hill and in Brussels. But Freedman cautions against snap judgments, including the view of some of Ukraine’s allies that a settlement is inevitable. “There are a number of features of this war that make it less than suitable for a major negotiating effort,” he writes.
As for the battlefield lessons, Russia’s shift to a war of “attrition” is not surprising, Freedman argues, pointing out how regularly that occurs in wars. But when it comes to the importance of leadership he is at one with Petraeus and Roberts: Putin, he concludes, “is left dealing with a catastrophe, for Russia as well as Ukraine, of his making.”
What about the future of weaponry? Among the innovations of this war, open-source intelligence from social media and mobile phone data has aided the accuracy of artillery and missiles. Petraeus and Roberts also stress that the conflict has underlined how electronic warfare can defeat precision weaponry, but that this will require “huge and ongoing investment”.
The point is well-timed, given the debate in Britain and elsewhere over levels of military spending. The authors believe that defence establishments in the west will need to invest in vast new stocks of arms and ammunition, having been shown how quickly they can run down in a hot war. They will also have to consider more public-private partnerships to fund defence innovation. In particular, they stress the increasingly varied potential of drones, suggesting that their use in Ukraine heralds a revolution that could lead to their being deployed at sea for up to six months, for example.
Petraeus and Roberts furthermore suggest that attacks by swarms of drones, such as those seen against infrastructure in Kyiv, foreshadow a longterm shift to a greater reliance on autonomous vehicles — and that ultimately some form of robot soldiers is inevitable. For them, the arrival of AI armies is only a matter of time. “The world of unmanned machine-on-machines conflict is not that many years from becoming reality,” they write. “The idea that they will not be deployed by countries out of moral considerations is ludicrous” — on the grounds that they offer the chance to keep humans away from the frontline.
As a caveat, however, they do quote Freedman, who historically has been a believer in the primacy of a human at war. In his 2022 book Command, he wrote: “Set against a human commander, an AI commander will still have many drawbacks. AI might be tactically brilliant but is strategically banal.” He does not address AI in his latest book, but he does caution that while it’s easy to portray the conflict as a triumph of cheap weaponry over expensive planes and tanks, both the latter remain utterly relevant.
At the start of the millennium, at the height of the US-led unipolar order, there were hopes that the era of major wars was over. Reflecting on the dashing of those dreams, Petraeus and Roberts nod to Plato, writing that “tragically he was right in concluding that only the dead have seen the end of war.” Freedman would surely agree.
Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, by David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts, William Collins £26, 544 pages
Modern Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine, by Lawrence Freedman, Penguin Australia AUS$12.99, 168 pages
Alec Russell is the FT’s foreign editor
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café