Modern warfare

Occasionally a book gets the next war right. In 1937, Heinz Guderian argued in Achtung – Panzer! that tanks should concentrate in armored formations, that those formations were best controlled by radio, and that their purpose was to break through enemy lines and fight beyond them. In 1940, Guderian used a German tank corps to punch through French defenses and trap almost two million Allied soldiers.

Jack Watling may have written another book like that. Watling, a British military analyst who works closely with the Ukrainian general staff, published The Arms of the Future in 2023. It argues that three forces define war today: the reach of sensors, the range of weapons, and the precision of munitions. All three are improving and have made the way armies previously fought impossible.

Sensors come in many forms. They include cameras mounted on consumer drones, commercial satellites and ground surveillance radars. Some listen: an acoustic sensor carried by a single soldier can identify a tank from ten kilometers away. Others use lasers to detect heartbeats or electronic emissions to locate a soldier making a phone call.

Once the sensors have found a target, modern munitions can destroy it from much further away. Eighty years ago, heavy artillery firing at sixteen kilometers missed by an average of fifty meters. In tests today, heavy artillery firing at seventy kilometers misses by an average of just two meters. Other weapons like rocket artillery and kamikaze drones regularly hit targets at twice that range.

This is a problem for the way modern militaries, including Western ones, fight. Generals try to combine surprise and concentration: secretly assembling a large group of soldiers and tanks and quickly overpowering the enemy. But both are impossible if a radar operator can spot vehicles assembling from fifty kilometers away and artillerymen start hitting them minutes later.

Already, grouping vehicles in Ukraine within a few tens of kilometers of the front line often gets them destroyed. As sensors and munitions improve, this ‘gray zone’ keeps growing, reaching far into what used to be the rear. The countryside, traditionally the place where generals like to maneuver, has become extremely dangerous: any concentration of forces is detected and then destroyed from a distance. How, then, should armies fight?

The first option soldiers have is to make themselves not worth shooting. They can do this by dispersing and hardening – digging deep holes and sitting in them. This is a great tactic when defending, but ensures that any attack they mount will be piecemeal and bloody.

Their second option is to withdraw to the places where cameras cannot see them and shells struggle to kill them: cities. To the modern soldier, the urban environment is like a warren of tunnels, full of shelters that preserve mobility. They require specialized troops to attack, and even then, fighting is difficult. But an army that ignores the countryside will soon find itself surrounded and cut off, and sitting in a city doesn’t solve the problem of attacking the enemy.

Their third option, and Watling’s preference, is to try to restore movement and surprise by fighting the sensors themselves. The ideal army of the future combines small groups of highly mobile soldiers that target enemy sensors and deploy their own with heavy artillery that support them from further back and specialized assault units that fight over cities and other strongpoints. The hope is not to revive the long offensives of Guderian’s tanks but to create a brief window in which troops can assemble and take a single objective without being spotted and destroyed.

The Arms of the Future came out three years ago, and Ukraine is still the site of a major ground war. Since then, that war has evolved along the lines Watling predicted. Most Ukrainian soldiers live underground, sometimes for months at a time and hundreds of meters from the nearest friendly unit. They avoid movement whenever possible and, when forced to hold ground, prefer towns and cities, as they did at Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka. A Ukrainian battalion commander tells Watling: ‘I don’t need reinforcements, I need buildings to fight from.’ The attacking Russians, who have no holes to sit in, no cities to shelter in, and can neither concentrate nor achieve surprise, are suffering astonishing losses.

That doesn't mean successful attacks have become entirely impossible. Some Ukrainian units, like the Third Assault Brigade, are learning to fight as Watling would want, targeting enemy sensors before grouping together and rushing forward. These attacks appear to be working, and may keep the battlefield moving for a while. But they will succeed only as long as they manage to keep blinding the enemy. If the cameras keep improving and the shells keep flying, that too may stop being an option.