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The recent invasion of Ukraine has prompted defence thinkers to reassess modern warfighting strategies, and the capabilities needed to achieve their goals.
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Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine has prompted a radical rethink of warfighting strategies the world over. In late November, it was reported in The Australian by Greg Sheridan that the “tank is gone”.
According to the piece, the upcoming Defence Strategic Review will “recommend reduced investment in armour – tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and similar beasts – in order to focus on far more relevant and important priorities.
“There is no plausible scenario in which tanks, or even IFVs, could be important to Australian security. This means no more than 300 of the gargantuan-sized and largely unusable IFVs.”
Such suggestions have been met with the ire of many defence professionals, maintaining the fundamental role of armour in protecting and facilitating troop movement.
The debate surrounding the acquisition of IFVs and tanks at the expense of naval and air capabilities has been fiercely fought in the lens of the Ukraine conflict.
Writing for War on the Rocks this week, Columbia University’s Professor Stephen Biddle examined the changing characteristics of war as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine — which has seen groundbreaking new technologies influence battlefield outcomes.
Namely, it has appeared that in the offence-defence spectrum, that defensive operations have achieved additional superiority in warfighting through distributed lethality.
“In this view, tanks, piloted aircraft, surface warships, and massed infantry formations were now just large, slow targets for small, cheap, precision weapons,” Professor Biddle contended.
“Surprise had become impossible in the face of long-range surveillance by drones and airborne radar. Breakthrough had thus become unachievable, and exploitation would be impossible even if breakthrough were not.”
While these observations were seemingly accurate in Ukraine’s summer months where there was little territorial change, Professor Biddle suggests that the recent counter-offensives have illustrated the role of combined arms manoeuvres.
“In fact, the patterns visible so far actually look a lot more like the past than like any new model of revolutionary transformation,” he suggests.
“And the policy prescriptions that follow from the transformation interpretation look correspondingly premature: calls for retiring tanks in favor of drones, or reframing military doctrine to avoid offensive action, are a poor fit to the actual pattern of combat observable to date in Ukraine.
“Tanks played prominent roles in both the breakthroughs and the stalemates.”
It is unclear whether Australia will embrace a path which sees a diminished role for armour, with the Defence Strategic Review scheduled for release early next year.
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