By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

What Russian Airstrikes Will Result In

On October 10-11, Russia escalated its war against Ukraine with an enormous wave of airstrikes against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure since the invasion began almost eight months earlier. In a 10 October statement, Secretary-General António Guterres called the air assaults “another unacceptable escalation of the war.”

The Kremlin has telegraphed that it wanted to slow Ukraine’s battlefield advances with strikes targeting infrastructure and civilians. Russian troops’ cruel logic, experts said, is that if they can’t beat Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield, they will try to harm their wives and children at home. And Putin also has to play for time, spreading out Ukrainian defenses, with a purported 300,000 mobilized Russian reserves not set to be ready for weeks.

Beginning in early October, facing huge territorial losses and other reversals in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin reached for a military strategy in which Russia should have a decisive advantage: airpower. In the most widespread such campaign, he ordered a blistering series of missile attacks against a dozen cities and electrical infrastructure across the country. Ukrainians were forced into basements and bomb shelters, and some 30 percent of the country’s power generation capacity was knocked out, causing rolling blackouts that affected homes, hospitals, and even the basic functioning of the economy. Recently, Russia has sent waves of drones to attack residential buildings and offices in Kyiv and other cities. In effect, Putin reminded the Ukrainian government of his ability to attack its main population centers.

The threat that Ukraine, having scrapped Soviet-era bombers long ago, having no long-range rockets able to hit Russian cities, and having only a tiny number on the ground, the goal, it seems, is to punish civilians, wearing them down in the hope of convincing their leaders to sue for peace.

But as suggested before, it is a strategy doomed to failure. As in earlier phases of the war, Russia’s supposed air superiority has done little to shift the overall momentum on the ground. Despite the significant damage they have caused, Putin’s airstrikes have failed to hinder Ukrainian advances in the east. And when they have reached civilian targets, they have only served to strengthen Ukrainian resolve.

The paradoxical outcome of Russia’s bombing campaigns suggests a more critical insight into airpower in contemporary warfare. For decades, bombing civilian areas—as ugly and immoral as it gets in war—has been one of the most common strategies states have used to undermine the target population’s morale and induce the target government to surrender. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, especially his recent escalation, has been no different. But as dozens of conflicts over the past century have demonstrated, using airpower against civilian targets is almost always doomed to failure. And as target countries like Ukraine obtain more advanced land-based munitions, the flaws of the airpower strategy have only become more apparent.

 

The Myth Of Shattered Morale

Modern states have often sought to punish the civilian populations of their adversaries. Generally, they have done so as a cheap and easy way to compel enemy governments to make concessions, retreat, or even surrender outright. The most common air strategy is attacking civilians, either directly by bombing residential areas or indirectly by damaging the economic infrastructure necessary for food distribution, homes heating homes, and the electrical powering of the civilian economy.

The idea started in World War I, when German leaders, desperate to knock the United Kingdom out of the war, launched waves of zeppelins—huge maneuverable balloons loaded with bombs—to attack London and other British cities. Later they added Gotha aerial bombers, killing many hundreds but producing no results until finally calling off the punishment campaign in 1917. Other strategic-bombing advocates, like Italian General Giulio Douhet, wrote highly influential books claiming that huge air attacks on the enemy’s cities would cause civilians to rise and demand that their government surrender, thus producing victory without the need for messy ground battles. Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States rapidly expanded their air forces in the 1920s and 1930s, basing their doctrines on the premise that direct or indirect attacks on civilians would be the key to winning modern wars.

These “get tough” strategies by governments have often been welcomed by their public because they can produce dramatic, immediate tactical results at a little military cost to one’s side and extract what is perceived as a measure of revenge for the rival's actions. Occasionally, strategic airpower had had notable results on the battlefield, as when the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force suppressed tribal rebellions in Iraq in the 1920s and when German planes helped General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist army capture territory in the Spanish Civil War. However, often overlooked in these cases was that changes in the military balance on the ground, rather than punishment of civilians, played a decisive role.

As many other conflicts have shown, the gains of punishment strategies tend to be short-lived. Consider what happened when German bombers blasted London and other British cities in 1940–41, killing more than 50,000 people. Like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky today, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to hide in bomb shelters. He would walk through the rubble, leading through demonstrative action and rallying the whole of society to make the sacrifices necessary for ultimate victory. Instead of shattering morale, the Blitz motivated the British to launch—with their American and Soviet allies—the counterattack that ultimately conquered Nazi Germany.

Indeed, inflicting punishment on civilian areas is immoral and is singularly unproductive as a strategy for putting pressure on an adversary. Whether the punishment is meted out massively or lightly, quickly or slowly, whether it is combined with diplomatic proposals or not, the historical record shows that harming civilians is also unlikely to compel rival states to surrender or to cut deals that effectively abandon territory that is important to the viability of the state or national identity.

Nor is there any case in which a bombing campaign has caused the targeted population to revolt against their government. For example, in several major wars in the second half of the twentieth century, Washington sought to foment popular uprisings against enemy regimes by attacking civilian infrastructure. Thus, during the Korean War, the United States destroyed 90 percent of power generation in North Korea; in the Vietnam War, it knocked out nearly as much power in North Vietnam; and in the Gulf War, American air attacks disrupted 90 percent of power generation in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But in none of these cases did the population rise up. Strikingly, the United States did not bother attacking Iraq’s electric power grid or civilians during its 2003 invasion. Concentrating on effective military strategy, it could easily defeat Iraq’s army and topple the Saddam dictatorship in six weeks.

In World War II, of course, the effects of the Allied bombardment of Germany and Japan were much more extreme. Cities were firebombed and destroyed by U.S. and British forces; conventional munitions killed more than 300,000 German civilians and 700,000 Japanese civilians—and more than 20 percent of each country’s population was homeless. Yet even then, there was no public pressure on either regime to surrender. Suppose modern nation-states in fights for the control of their homeland can withstand that. In that case, there is little reason to think that Russia’s relatively less punishing bombardment of civilians in Ukraine will cause Ukrainians or their leaders to give in.

 

Hammer Requires Anvil

By contrast, airpower has proved effective in achieving military objectives rather than punishing civilians. In war after war, theater airpower—smashing enemy ground forces and weakening them to the point where one’s ground forces can dominate a zone of conflict—can provide a powerful tool of coercion combined with adequate land power. In 1972, the United States compelled North Vietnam to cease conventional aggression by coordinating its massive Linebacker bombing campaign with South Vietnamese army forces. In 1991, the United States successfully made Saddam withdraw from Kuwait by combining the first modern precision air campaign with a coalition of ground forces. And the absence of theater airpower can seal the fate of a friendly army, as the United States discovered when Congress blocked the use of U.S. airpower in Vietnam in 1974, and Saigon fell the following year. The lesson was repeated in Afghanistan, with the U.S. withdrawal of theater airpower before the collapse of the Afghan army in the summer of 2021.

A Ukrainian flag on a street of the recently liberated village of Vysokopillya

The combined use of theater airpower and friendly ground forces has a clear logic. Once wars begin in earnest, achieving victory becomes paramount. In war, successful leaders soon discover—sometimes after exhausting cheaper but less effective strategies—denial is the key to successful coercion. Successful leaders realize there is no realistic option other than directly thwarting the enemy’s ability to take or hold territory. In other words, the coercing state succeeds to the extent that it can prevent its opponent from achieving its military objectives.

In actual warfare, denial works best via a strategy in which the combined force of air power and ground power puts the enemy in a military Catch-22. Suppose the enemy concentrates its ground forces in large numbers to form thick and overlapping fields of fire to withstand a ground assault best. Those forces will become vulnerable to the air, and the airpower hammer can smash them to bits. But suppose the enemy disperses its ground forces across a wide area to make effective airstrikes more complex. In that case, it risks leaving them thinly scattered and exposed to easy defeat on the ground, allowing friendly ground forces to overwhelm isolated enemy units, easily break through weak enemy lines, and encircle vast portions of the enemy forces.

From its previous wars, Russia should have understood the need to combine air and ground power. Consider its supposed successes in punishing civilians in Chechnya during the 1990s or in Aleppo during the Syrian civil war. Although Russian military forces indeed extracted a heavy price from civilian populations in both cases, what ultimately mattered was the balance of forces on the ground. In Chechnya, Russia blasted civilians in Grozny in 1994. Still, its ground forces were soon defeated by the rebels, and the Russian military successfully conquered the republic by invading with a much larger ground army in 1999. In Aleppo, the forces of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah ultimately made the difference, taking rapid control of areas bombed by Russia. Take away these well-equipped ground forces, and Russia’s air campaigns would almost certainly have failed.

 

From The Ground Up

Much has been made in recent years of advances in precision weaponry, ostensibly strengthening the hand of airpower. Yet today’s precision weapons have not proved any more effective in coercing enemies by destroying political and economic targets in civilian areas since it has long been possible to destroy such targets with large numbers of “dumb” bombs. Nor have precision weapons made strategies targeting the enemy’s leadership any more effective. Such efforts have repeatedly failed against various enemies, including Muammar al-Qaddafi in 1986; Saddam Hussein in 1991, 1998, and 2003 (ground forces finally captured him); and Hezbollah leaders in 2006.

Moreover, nothing motivates an enemy’s civilian base more than killing its leader. In April 1996, Russia used air-to-ground missiles to assassinate the Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, only to see a more energetic leader take over, kick Russia’s ground forces out of the republic, and win control when Russia invaded with massive ground forces three years later. There are exceptions to this pattern, but they only prove the rule: aerial targeting of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan from 2001 to 2010 succeeded in weakening the group, precisely because it had so little indigenous support in Pakistan.

The true innovation of precision airpower has been to enhance the value of the hammer-and-anvil strategy. Today’s precision weapons allow airpower to destroy massed enemy ground troops more efficiently and attack other smaller but essential battlefield targets. Until the advent of these weapons, airpower could rarely destroy tanks, trucks, command posts, or bridges used to supply fielded forces, even with thousands of bombs aimed at these tiny targets. Now, satellites, advanced sensors, and various manned and unmanned bombing platforms can reliably locate concentrated enemy forces for precision strikes to destroy.

This precision revolution has been more evident than in Ukraine’s military forces. Even before the arrival of advanced precision weapons from the West in the early summer, Ukrainian forces had been greatly strengthened by the fighting resolve that Russia’s failed invasion strategy had provoked. Since then, Ukrainian troops have been able to use two primary forces and an encirclement maneuver splendidly to Kyiv’s advantage—not only in defending against Russia’s initial incursion but also in rolling back Russian forces, even in areas of the east that were far better defended. These tactics have been especially effective against Russia’s most dug-in, best defensively fortified ground forces in eastern zones of the country. Ukraine’s triumphs in these situations have been made possible not by tactical airpower but by advanced ground-based weaponry, such as the HIMARS missile system. It is not a stretch to consider each HIMARS missile battery—the United States has provided Ukraine with 16 of them, with another 18 on the way—as having the air-to-ground combat power and effectiveness of several F-16 aircraft. With the flexibility and range to coordinate with Ukrainian ground forces, they can be used against Russian forces in a given area, wherever they may be.

Just as important, Russia has made clear through its battlefield performance that it has hardly begun to move into the precision age. The world has witnessed how poorly a great power with a huge but largely “dumb bomb” military may fare against a much smaller state with access to precision-age weapons. The Russian military has been losing territory steadily for many months—in March and April. It May near Kyiv and the border with Belarus, and since the early summer in the territories, it had newly seized in the east. There is no obvious reason to think that the Russian military’s pre–February 2022 positions in the east and Crimea are not ultimately vulnerable as well.

 

Losing Ukraine Or Losing Russia?

Given the failure of Putin’s campaign of civilian punishment and the growing effectiveness of Ukraine’s HIMARS-assisted ground offensive, many commentators have begun to ask how the war might end. History shows that when an opponent is persuaded that specific territorial objectives cannot be achieved, it is likely to concede that territory, either tacitly or formally, rather than suffer further pointless losses. But this form of coercion—getting an opponent to recognize that prolonging a war is futile—is rarely cheap or easy. Even successful coercion usually takes nearly as long and costs almost as much as fighting a war to a finish. This lesson applies readily to the war in Ukraine today.

Given current military realities, those calling for the United States and its allies to persuade Ukraine to accept a deal in the east are asking the West to bail out Russia. This is unrealistic for two reasons. First, Ukraine will not and should not agree. Its forces have the momentum and have every reason to expect more territorial gains, and it would be foolish to force them to abandon a winning hand. Second, Russia might accept a deal soon but could easily violate it months or years later. In short, any deal in eastern Ukraine is unlikely to be credible unless powerful reinforcing mechanisms can back it up. These mechanisms would need to include agreements to respect international borders with the presence of third-party oversight, as well as military forces. They would likely be necessary to stabilize any end to the war, negotiated or not.

In the meantime, the United States and NATO are right to reinforce support and provide additional air defenses for Ukraine. These steps can mitigate some of the harm to civilians by Russia’s attacks and demonstrate that attacking urban centers only hardens the resolve of the West and Ukraine. Ultimately, an end to the war while the current regime remains in power in Russia would likely require establishing a hard militarized border to keep Russia from potential conquests in Ukraine and other parts of eastern Europe. As with the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, such a fortified boundary would prevent advances in both directions. It would also deter any conventional offensive by either side by denying Russia and the West the prospect of rapid territorial incursions.

But as Putin has made clear with his escalating nuclear rhetoric, the conflict potentially involves more than conventional weapons positions in eastern Ukraine. Still, he could risk losing large parts of Russia by going nuclear. To paraphrase the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, this would be committing suicide for fear of death.

Indeed, no matter how lethal its bombs are against civilians, Russia cannot reverse its strategic failures in Ukraine, which are already playing out. Once Putin lost the gamble that Russia’s military had the wherewithal to defeat and occupy all of Ukraine in the February–March blitzkrieg campaign. Once Ukraine and the West responded by mobilizing a powerful counterbalancing coalition to defend the country, Russia’s options narrowed almost immediately. Since April, many in the West—and Putin and others in Russia—have been watching the inevitable aftermath of the initial miscalculations that led to that massive failure.

Putin can punish Ukrainians, as his air campaign has shown. But lacking an effective hammer-and-anvil strategy of his own, he is only losing faster. The only question is whether he will accept a new iron curtain separating Russia from Europe or continue fighting pointlessly to the finish and risk losing parts of Russia.

As for today, Western analysts gave an unambiguous interpretation of Russian general Surovikin's statements about "difficult decisions" regarding Kherson. They believe it means preparing for a retreat from the right bank of the Dnieper. While British intelligence suggests that the withdrawal will be carried out with the help of a barge bridge and pontoon crossings. And The American Institute for the Study of War reports that Surovikin's statements "are likely attempts to set information conditions for a full Russian retreat across the Dnipro River, which would cede Kherson City and another significant territory in Kherson Oblast to advancing Ukrainian troops.

 

 

For updates click hompage here