_This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on March 6, 2025._ [_Watch the full video here._](https://www.csis.org/events/human-domain-lessons-russia-ukraine-conflict-focus)
Colonel Scott Pence: The war in Ukraine is being fought by men and women with lives, families, thoughts, and fears. Welcome to the Human Domain Panel of Conflict in Focus: Lessons from Russia-Ukraine.
(Music plays.)
I’m Colonel Scott Pence, the U.S. Army military fellow at CSIS. And I am joined by a panel of experts today. They are Dr. Ben Connable, adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University and fellow at the Atlantic Council; Colonel Mark Cancian, colonel, retired, U.S. Marine Corps, and senior expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and David Barno, lieutenant general, retired, U.S. Army and professor of practice and senior fellow at the Merrill Center of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. We’ll be featuring comments from my interview with Lieutenant Colonel Volodymyr Dutko of the Ukrainian Army.
Let’s start now with my interview with Lieutenant Colonel Dutko. I interviewed him from our CSIS studios here to his location in Kyiv, Ukraine. Colonel Dutko is a Ukrainian special forces officer currently conducting advanced training before he returns to the front. He’s a veteran of the 2014 conflict, the defense in 2022, and the 2024 Kursk incursion. In this first clip, the longest of the series, I asked him to describe what it is like as a commander of forces in this war.
Lieutenant Colonel Volodymyr Dutko: (From video.) You are responsible for human life and you need to execute the different types of mission. And first of all, to protect native land, homes, relatives or people, and to minimize casualty, to execute the mission. What are the feelings of a commander? For me, it’s high emotional stuff feels – high emotions are different. And, you know, in our – in our Ukrainian system, it’s called one month in combat; it means three months in peace.
And imagine if you spent a month here in a high emotional environment, and you spend all time accepting the risks, challenges, and you need to give the orders to personnel. And you – and you know, and I know, for example, that the people could not return from the mission, but they could risk all different types of tasks, it’s very necessary. Because in the beginning of each mission, or each call this “business trip,” the execution of each mission, it takes more emotional preparation, probably. But when you start, a situation moves, moves, moves, and it goes after that more smoothly, something like that. And human domains, now it’s total different, for example, it was 2014, when I was young lieutenant. It was total different in ’22, in the beginning of the war. And total different, for example, in fall ’24.
Col. Pence: Now I’ll go to our panelists here in the room. General Barno, you served 30 years in uniform and were the senior commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Before that, you experienced combat firsthand as a ranger company commander during the 1983 Granada invasion and as a ranger battalion operations officer in the 1989 Panama invasion. You and Nora Bensahel wrote “Adaptation Under Fire.” After three years of watching Ukraine demonstrate its adaptability and combat, what lessons can we take from Ukrainian adaptability?
Lieutenant General David Barno (Ret.): Well, I think it’s important to recognize – and I think the reason the war in Ukrainians has got so much attention – is it’s the first epic land conflict of the 21st century. We can look back on U.S. operations in the first decade of the century in Afghanistan and Iraq. They don’t compare with what we’re seeing in Ukraine today – the length of the conflict, number of casualties. The British Ministry of Defense reported that the Russians alone have lost as many as 430,000 killed and wounded last year in 2024. Staggering numbers. The Ukrainians somewhere significantly less than that, numbers are in disputes, 60,000 or so. But this is a massive land campaign in Eastern Europe, of all places, which was very unexpected, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
So it is an incredible laboratory of warfare that needs to be studied very carefully. Adaptation has been perhaps the hallmark of this conflict. And the Ukrainians and the Russians have both been adapting at a very rapid pace. The Ukrainians staying slightly ahead of the Russians, I think, arguably, in most arenas. But they’re moving at a pace of change during the war – which is very much what our book, “Adaptation Under Fire,” was about, how militaries change during wartime. They’re moving at a pace that I think any other military in the world would have great difficulty replicating, to include the U.S. military.
So I have concerns that the U.S. isn’t learning enough from the adaptation part of this conflict. We’re starting to move in different areas in terms of increasing our acquisition of weaponry and munitions. We’re looking at the drone threat and we’re moving, I think relatively slowly, to adapt to what we’re seeing there. Last year in Ukraine alone, the nation produced upwards of a million drones, which would be, you know, almost impossible for the United States to do in the same period of time, from where we are today. So I think the adaptation that’s going on there, and this rapid cycle of adaptation on both sides, is something that the U.S. military needs to look at in and of itself.
How do you become adaptable? What can you put in place in peacetime to instill a culture of rapid adaptability in your military for wartime? Because adapting and innovation in peacetime is very different than doing it in the midst of a conflict when you’re reacting to an adversary out there who’s trying to outpace you at the very same time. So lots of individual things to study. I think the drone aspect of this is, in some ways, the most interesting.
And the return to ways of fighting we hadn’t seen since probably the middle of the last century, trench warfare, you know, mass artillery being used on the battlefield, camouflage, concealment. You know, techniques that have been lost, largely, in the U.S. military during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that now are being very much brought back to the fore, in an environment with high tech all around them. So I think the U.S. has got to go to school on this and be ready to move much more rapidly than we are today as we look at some of the lessons from this war.
Col. Pence: Thank you. Turning now to Dr. Ben Connable. Dr. Connable, you’re a veteran yourself, with service in Iraq up to the rank of major in the U.S. Marine Corps. After retirement you pursued extensive studies in the Middle East as a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation. You earned your doctorate in war from King’s College London, studying adaptation in the U.S. Marine Corps. Currently you’re a fellow with the Atlantic Council and a professor of security studies at Georgetown University. In 2018 you published the book, “The Will to Fight.” My introductory question to you is: With modern technology and a transparent battlefield, does the military’s will to fight still matter?
Major Ben Connable (Ret.): I’m going to take that as a rhetorical question. I think we all generally concur that it does. But more importantly, our collective understanding of warfare across the entire U.S. military, across all NATO – basically, the Western concept of war has remained effectively unchanged. That we believe in this Clausewitzian ideal of war as a contest of two opposing, hostile, and irreconcilable wills. Now we say that up front in all of our doctrinal publications, and then we very quickly put it aside and pretend it doesn’t – it’s not true. Or we pay lip service to it, or we believe that we have the market cornered on all these very complex issues, like leadership and training. And then there’s always kind of a clear pathway to understand it, and then we can focus on technology, we can focus on counting equipment.
And that’s generally how we compare combat power, right? We count things. And will is not something that you can measure. However, it can be assessed. And thus far, we’ve done almost nothing collectively – and I’ll point fingers at the United States here, and that’s what we did in that report – that we’ve done almost nothing to improve our ability to understand or assess will to fight. And you saw that in the early days of the Ukraine conflict. And we generally assessed that the Russians were going to fight no matter what and we generally assessed that the Ukrainians were going to quit no matter what. And that turned out not to be true.
And what was fascinating at the time is there was congressional testimony after the 2022 invasion. And General Scott Berrier, who is the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, actually apologized to Congress for not getting that right. And you go back and look at the apologies that were made after we misjudged Afghan will to fight, we misjudged Vietnamese will to fight, we misjudged Iraqi will to fight. So we kind of got a trend going here. And I would argue that we need to start by having a definition of what will the fight means. But specifically for the Ukraine and Russia war, there are ways to assess this. We have to stop treating it as a kind of a subjective interpretation or a hip shot thought – or, a hip shot assessment.
And that there are structured approaches to take. And some of those have been adopted by the U.S. government already. And I believe that we’re right when we say war is a contest of two opposing, hostile, and reconcilable wills. But we need to take that a step further. And you could hear it in the initial comments from the colonel, that this is about people. And war has always been about people. And it always will be about people. No matter how many things we automate there’s always going to be a person, and people are always going to matter. So the answer the rhetorical question, yes.
Col. Pence: Thank you. Colonel Cancian, you served over three decades in the U.S. Marine Corps, active and reserve, serving in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War. You published over 40 articles on military operations, acquisition, budgets, and strategy. In 2018, you published a comprehensive study of surprise, titled “Coping with Surprise.” What are some key insights we should take from this war?
Colonel Mark Cancian (Ret.): Well, the first one is that stuff happens. The unexpected happens. When you look at this war, people couldn’t believe that in the 21st century one country would try to conquer another one. It seemed so 18th century and outmoded. But that’s exactly what happened. And I make this point when people look at other global conflicts, for example, Taiwan, and say – point out that although a war is not inevitable, it is plausible that something could happen there. If the Chinese were to invade Taiwan, no one would slap their forehead and say, wow, didn’t see that coming, because we’ve been expecting it for a long time. So things happen.
The second thing is that we are prisoners of the historical narrative. And by that, I mean that it’s hard to capture what it was like as events were unfolding. There’s a great quote in Dean Acheson’s book that we view the past through the lens of knowing how things came out. And it’s very difficult to capture what it was like to know the beginning only. So there’s a tendency in historical writing to argue that events had to happen this way, and that the course of history was inevitable. But history is very contingent. And the way things actually happened is only one way that they could have happened. And recognizing that things could happen differently is, I think, a critical element of recognizing that we can influence those courses of action.
This gets into an issue about thinking about the future. That is, should we – can we look into the future with any confidence and predict what that future is going to look like? On the one hand, there are people who argue that if you – you know, if you think hard enough, project trends, maybe play out some scenarios, that you can get a sense about what the future, in this case, the future of warfare, might look like. On the other hand, I tend to be skeptical, in the sense that because history is so contingent that there’s a lot of – a lot of expectations that don’t play out. There are a lot of surprises that don’t play out. And it’s very hard to look beyond the next couple of years. And what that drives me to is what we heard from General Barno, adaptation and having a lot of tools to be able to react to this unexpected future.
Col. Pence: Right. During my interview with Lieutenant Colonel Dutko, he described the exhaustion of an average day. Here it is now.
Lt. Col. Dutko: (From video.) It’s very difficult conditions there because everything wants to destroy you. You, like for example, walk for three, four hours. You all time need to work in the high risk area. So, emotionally, you all time need to observe everything what’s going on around you, and not just on the battlefields but also around you.
Col. Pence: Dr. Connable, from your research on the study of the battle of the Irpin River, how does Colonel Dutko’s description resonate with you?
Major Connable: It lines up almost perfectly with almost every other experience that soldiers have had in warfare throughout history. I teach a course on human behavior in war at Georgetown. And one of the assigned readings is “Anatomy of Courage” by Lord Moran. And you can pull elements of Lord Moran’s writing out and cut and paste it into a lot of the interviews we see, including this one from the colonel. That it is – it is physically and psychologically exhausting to be deprived of food, to be constantly under the threat of death and maiming, to see people killed and wounded. It creates fatigue. And I think it’s important, going back to my earlier comments, not to jump on one factor and to believe that it can be determinative in exclusion of all other factors. And we need to look at human will as a holistic challenge.
So fatigue is a contributing factor because we see tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers continuing to fight through their fatigue. And we’ve seen that throughout history as well. So it is certainly a factor but, I would argue to – I would argue for caution in overestimating its impact.
Col. Pence: Thank you.
Lt. Gen Barno: One of the factors here, I think, that is going to be new to the U.S. military, should it find itself in a conflict like this, is the perpetual, continual, unending exposure to danger, to risk, to casualties, and to fighting. If we look back at the wars of the last 20 years, they were relatively episodic in terms of the fighting aspect of it for U.S. forces. Many forces actually would go out and conduct a mission, and they would come back to a relatively secure base. They’d have access to the internet, to showers, to communications, to hot meals. Then they would sortie back out again.
That’s not how the war in Ukraine is playing out. And that’s not likely how a major war that United States gets involved within the future with a Russia or a China is going to play out. So beginning to prepare U.S. military leaders and troops to fight for this long, unending battle, and to have the resilience to be able to function effectively and fight effectively in that environment, is going to be a huge challenge for the U.S. We simply don’t have any recent experience that looks like that.
Col. Cancian: And if I could add, we did some war gaming on a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan. And one of the points we made was that the scale of U.S. losses is going to be unlike anything we have experienced since at least the Korean War, and maybe even before – particularly for the Navy and the Air Force which have tended to operate out of sanctuary since, really, the Second World War. And the example I use is follow on forces, air forces coming into Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa.
And I say that they will land on a runway that’s very bumpy because it’s been hit by Chinese missiles several times. They’ll taxi passed literally hundreds of wrecked aircraft that were destroyed on the ground. They would move into a barracks that was vacated by the previous squadron because they were all killed in the previous attack. The golf course is going to be turned into an improvised cemetery. The hospital will be filled with wounded. And they’ll be told, welcome Okinawa. Tomorrow you fly over Taiwan. And this is an experience that we have not had, really, for 70 years.
Col. Pence: No. And in this conflict, as we mentioned at the beginning, one of the great interests is drone technology. I asked Colonel Dutko about the back-and-forth struggle between drones and jammers.
Lt. Col. Dutko: (From video.) Now it’s not gamechanger, but very, very strong advance. It’s using for optic channel for drones. Because EW, electronic warfare, it modernizes, adapts. It’s frequencies, jammers, even FPV – you establish, for example, FPV channel for communication, 400 megahertz, and immediately electronic warfare also trying to protect. Now it’s development and blocking since development.
Col. Pence: So we have an image of this type of drone, the fiber optic drone. And we’re able to recreate that for us to look at here. So imagine in the human domain a type of drone like this, that is observing your every move, and is un-jammable. What you see underneath the UAV there is a receptacle that can hold a fiber optic cable for up to three kilometers, five kilometers, or a larger receptacle could be even up to 10 kilometers. So it’s un-jammable by our current electronic warfare systems. And it would be observing, surveilling, and calling in artillery or FPV drones on your position. What is it like to survive in a battlefield like that, when you don’t have defenses against it?
Lt. Gen. Barno: I think the U.S. is going to have to confront the fact that we are behind in drone warfare. That we simply have not embraced the reality that the Ukrainians and the Russians are living with and fighting with every day. We’re gradually starting to make investments in less expensive drones, but even the less expensive drones are in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, maybe far more than that. And we’re not buying them and developing them at scale. We certainly haven’t integrated them into how we fight in our doctrine and our training centers.
And so I don’t think the reality of what drones mean on the battlefield is really sunk into U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, or special operators. It is a gamechanger. It is not anything we’ve encountered before. We certainly haven’t encountered the psychological impact of having, you know, a machine looking at you all the time that is devoted to killing you, with an operator who’s going to track you down on the battlefield, individually in some cases, to kill you. So both the psychological aspect of that and the material aspect of the U.S., in effect, being far behind Russia and Ukraine – which are not, you know, top-end powers in the world in this particular technology – is very worrisome to me.
Col. Cancian: I’d add two things. One is, to build on what General Barno said, just how different the battlefields would be for U.S. troops. They are so accustomed to living on large FOBs and not having to camouflage themselves, having these – what are essentially safe spaces. And to be in a situation where you are observed all the time is going to be very different. It’s going to take some time to get used to it. Just giving up one’s cellphone, you know, which have become like an appendage for the younger generations, is going to be difficult.
Another thing that’s interesting is that there was a lot of expectation that drones would be important in the next conflict. Just about every thinker who looked at the future talked about drones.
But what we didn’t expect was that it was small drones that were going to be the real factor here. We were thinking more in terms of Predator and Reaper, the kinds of drones that we used in Iraq and Afghanistan. And those were used early in the war, but they’re, like, slow, propeller-driven airplanes. They’re very vulnerable. And now the battlefield has shifted to these very small, very expendable, essentially one-way drones, or a drone that you may use, you know, two or three times before it gets destroyed. So, yes, we expected drones, but not this way. And, again, it makes the point about how important adaptation is.
Major Connable: I’ll agree with two points and take a slightly different tack on another. So, first of all, I agree with General Barno that the United States has done a terrible job of keeping up with – not just understanding drone technology, but acquiring it at the bleeding edge, but also counter-drone technology. And we’ve got plenty of stuff in experimentation. We have some things on the battlefield. But it’s nowhere near sufficient. But, you know, General Barno and I, and others, and Mark, has written about adaptability. And there will be a counter-drone kind of surge as well. And the colonel pointed to that.
And then, Mark, I agree that our biggest failure was not – is a cognitive failure, that we didn’t think about this shift from the large – the type – the large-type drones to the smaller-type drones. However, I would argue that there’s – this is not necessarily a gamechanger. And that we have to – we have to put the Ukraine war, and the Nagorno-Karabakh war, which a lot of people refer to, in context. Drones have been a part of the battlefield since World War II. They’ve been a significant part of the battlefield since the 1980s, with the Israelis and South Africans employing drones en masse.
And it’s this is more of a catch up at the low end than anything else. We have to also keep in mind that both Russia and Ukraine have a static frontline of 1,200 kilometers, with their entire industrial base behind them in static locations feeding drones into the frontline. That it will not be true in every situation on the modern battlefield, where this quantity of drones will just be inexhaustible. And we need to think about that.
Col. Pence: Right. There are specifics to this conflict –the lack of air superiority, for one. And we shouldn’t overstate the power of a drone like that, that’s fiber optic controlled. We know that it’s vulnerable to having that line cut. It’s vulnerable to also another drone that could come and prey upon it in the sky. So it’s not invincible. But it’s definitely a new development that we’re seeing just recently in the conflict.
Lt. Gen. Barno: One thing I’d add to that, and I think – and Michael Kofman has written and talked about this quite a bit – is this is – the change is essentially we had a precision weapons and a precision munition regime the United States mastered in the First Gulf War, brought into the 21st century. But it was very limited in terms of the number of systems that were out there. But what Michael Kofman was talking about is we now have a marriage of precision and mass. We now have relatively inexpensive, precise weapons that are used en masse on the battlefield that are changing the dynamics out there in ways that, as Colonel Cancian pointed out, we did not really expect.
We were very much wedded to our own concept of drone use, which was a very artificial construct based upon the unique environments of Iraq and Afghanistan, with no enemy ability to interfere with that. And now we’re seeing masses of drones, literally tens of thousands of drones out there in battlefield all day, every day. And I think that’s going to be imported by any military that adapts that into whatever way they fight. And it will change, you know, both wars of maneuver – although, as Dr. Connable pointed out, it’s a very different environment in a static situation Ukraine. They will become part of wars of maneuver as well. Not in the same density, but they will have a significant effect out there that we’re just beginning to think through.
Col. Pence: And that discussion leads us right into the role of other forces on the battlefield. Many people have said that the power of drones and ubiquity of drones on the battlefield had made tanks no longer a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield. I asked Lieutenant Colonel Dutko about that in the interview.
Lt. Col. Dutko: (From video.) Infantry, they are less psychologically prepared, like, for example, 10 years ago, in 2014, because now they’re confident that it’s wrong – it’s a total wrong philosophy and mindset. Because the infantry guys who stay in defense lines, they just expect that drones, artillery, and LAV, Javelin destroys those tanks, and they will step up to the rim and so forth. We lost a lot of guys doing this.
Col. Pence: Whether it was the Blitzkrieg of World War II, Yom Kippur War, or the Gulf War, we saw the power of armored formation and their psychological effects on the enemy. Has that era ended? Or what should we take from what we’re seeing in the battlefields of Ukraine?
Col. Cancian: I think that the jury’s still out on this one. On the one hand, people have made the argument that the large Russian losses of tanks – which number the thousands – have shown that tanks are now obsolete. On the other hand, people point out that if you go back to World War II, Battle of Kursk, hundreds of tanks destroyed, but no one argued that tanks were obsolete because, of course, they were a critical weapon system for the remainder of that war. What we really don’t have is a good handle on how useful they are. Part of the problem is that much of our information is filtered through the Ukrainians. You only see those successful drone strikes. You don’t see the unsuccessful ones. You don’t see the times that tanks overran their positions. So we really need a lot more information here.
When you look back on the United States experience in the Second World War with the Navy, it was a debate between carriers and battleships. Both of them turned out to be quite vulnerable. And, of course, we lost eight battleships at Pearl Harbor. Japanese lose four carriers at Midway. We lose many carriers in 1942. But what happened was it turns out carriers could continue to strike decisive blows, whereas battleships couldn’t get close enough to use their main armament. So not only were they vulnerable, but they weren’t as useful. And we may be in a situation with tanks. You know, it may be that they’re vulnerable but still useful. It may be that, ultimately, they’re not quite worth the cost. But I think the jury’s out and we need more information.
Major Connable: I’ll say it’s in, but your points are all well taken. I just finished a study of 423 modern battles from 2003 to 2022, including 61 battles in Ukraine. I’m immersed in the Ukraine stuff on a daily basis. I’m not there. But there’s no doubt that tanks still have a critical role on the battlefield. And they’re still performing the functions that tanks have historically performed, which is to provide shock, speed, mobile protected firepower up to the line of contact. And there are there – you’re right about the videos. I mean, they’re very carefully curated. But the Ukrainians also put out plenty of videos of their own tanks being – conducting successful operations.
Bad tactics are obvious on both sides, and those often contribute to the losses. But the losses of tanks in the Ukraine war are far lower on a day-to-day rate than they have been in most previous wars. They’re about 39 times – or, 38 or 39 times lower than they were in the 1973 war. They’re far lower than they were in the Gulf War. So it’s about four tanks a day, on both sides, that are lost in the Ukraine war. And, actually, if you look historically over time, that’s a pretty sustainable number. Now, you know, it’s going to run out at some point. The losses are going to – may catch up with the production. But the Russians have been stepping up their production. The question is, can the West also keep up its production?
Lt. Gen. Barno: Yeah, I would agree that vulnerable but useful is probably a good descriptor in terms of tanks moving forward. One of the challenges is you’re in a static situation right now. Tanks are at their best when they can get in a maneuver warfare, a mobile warfare environment. And they still provide, you know, as Dr. Connable pointed out, the speed, the shock action, the firepower that no other system can bring to the battlefield. One of the big challenges, though, is going to be the cost imposition of the ability to take out a tank versus the cost of the tank. How many tanks at several million dollars a pop can you afford, if they can be destroyed by hundreds of mass drones that cost $1,000 apiece?
So this whole issue of can – and you saw in the video some of the – you know, the jury-rigged protection measures put around tanks. You know, the cages and other things to try and prevent the drones from getting in there. That’s a sign that we’re not quite where we need to be in terms of design against this new threat. So I think it’s going to – they’ll continue to be important on the battlefield. They are far more vulnerable and more visible than they perhaps were in previous years. And, as Colonel Cancian pointed out, the jury’s still out of where that’s going. I don’t think we should abandon them yet, though.
Col. Pence: And you lead us to what Colonel Dutko also expanded upon, what he saw in his experiences in conflict with tanks. The next clip talked about when you see more than one tank.
Lt. Col. Dutko: (From video.) If you in the frontline, on the defense line, for example, days, weeks, and so on. It’s also a psychological effect, because it’s not just one tank in one month attacks you. It’s very easy to destroy one time in months. But when it attacks you couple days per day.
Col. Pence: And that really speaks to what we’re seeing, the psychological effect of armor assaults when they’re coordinated with infantry, especially when there are actually combined arms maneuver. Our next subject is, in a transparent battlefield there could be nowhere to hide. I asked Colonel Dutko about whether surprise in warfare is still possible.
Lt. Col. Dutko: (From video.) Surprise can be possible also, simultaneously. OK, space, now each formation try to conceal in different forests, buildings, to conceal forces as can as possible. You could see, for example, or analyze each target which Ukrainian precise munition eliminated headquarters. They usually are locate in factories, plants, some educational facilities, and so on. It’s not tents or barracks somewhere in the open fields. It’s sometimes possible to see and identify it’s headquarters, and so on. From the satellites you could identify not more the companies, or something.
Col. Pence: Colonel Cancian, your 2018 book, “Coping with Surprise” is one of the best overviews of battlefield surprise. How should we think about surprise in modern warfare?
Col. Cancian: Let me talk about surprise at a strategic level, and I’ll leave it to my fellow panelists to talk about it at a more tactical level. But in the monograph I looked at surprise four different ways – technical surprise, strategic surprise, political/diplomatic surprise, and battlefield surprise. And you’ve seen all of them in this conflict, starting with strategic surprise. Of course, as we talked about earlier, very few people thought that this war would occur, but it did.
Technical surprise. Of course, we’ve seen drones and other aspects – new aspects of conflict that have evolved. And one thing I would point out – two things on technical surprise. The first is that it is – it frequently happens, but it’s rarely decisive because of this measure, countermeasure, counter-countermeasure dynamic that the colonel talked about, and we’ve heard about. That is, if one side does something, the other side will figure out ways to counter it, and then they’ll come up with another counter, and back and forth. And for that reason, technical surprises tend to be short lived.
When we talk about political/diplomatic surprises, again, we’ve seen that. The political alignments are very different now than there were at the beginning of the war. We have two new members of NATO, which no one would have predicted just a couple of years ago. On the other hand, the Russians have put together this axis of evil, if you will, with the Iranians, the North Koreans, and the Chinese. They’ve come together to oppose the West.
And then finally, on the battlefield we have seen both surprises – well, some surprises, of course, caused by technology, that we’ve talked about. One of the surprises too is just that things didn’t change. A lot of people thought that, you know, future conflicts were going to be long-range, precision strike, push-button wars. And what we’re seeing in these clips is trenches and artillery. I mean, it looks a lot like World War I, but with some additional capabilities. So I think that – you know, the need, for example, for masses of artillery, was unexpected.
Col. Pence: We’ll start with General Barno.
Lt. Gen. Barno: I think surprise is still going to be possible at the tactical level, but it’s going to be more difficult. Deception is going to play an important role, as it always has. The reality is there are many more sensors, many more eyes that can look at the battlefield now. And even non-major state actors can purchase some of those as a service. You know, satellite imagery and things that used to be the province of only superpowers to put those things up, now there’s a myriad of assets that are available that you can actually buy on the internet. So the ability to hide what you’re doing on the battlefield is going to be much, much more difficult.
We’re also able to look into the cyber domain to see, for example, as happened in Ukraine, some of the logistics build up before the war that, I think, contributed to some of the early warning, that was discounted in a lot of cases, that this war was about to occur. So it’s still possible. It’s going to be much more difficult. Deception, camouflage, ruses, tricks are going to be critical if you expect to spoof all of these sensors that are now starting to proliferate out there, that most powers, even modest ones, are going to have access to in the future, right.
Col. Pence: Right, right.
Major Connable: I concur with Colonel Cancian and General Barno, across the board. And I think I would just try to drive home the point that, of course, surprise is still possible. And I think we have a tendency to take technological change or warfare concepts and extrapolate them out to their extreme end and say: OK, well, with a transparent battlefield, no surprise is possible. Technically, that would be true if the battlefield were completely transparent. It’s not, because if it were then nobody would be fighting anymore. It would all be done. So clearly, somebody’s achieving surprise somewhere. Clearly it’s not a push-button war, where if you see something you destroy it.
So going back to William Owens, you know, 2000, “Lifting the Fog of War,” that whole revolution has not been achieved. And to drive home Colonel Cancian’s point, I mean, this is – this takes us back to Rupert Smith and his “Utility of Force” in 2007, where he said, you know, war is dead basically. War is a thing of the past. There will be no industrial warfare in the future. And that turned out not to be true. So you can go back – you know, it’s ahistorical to say that surprise will be unachievable at some point in the future because of technology or change.
Col. Pence: That’s really good insights from all of you. In 2024, we saw the insertion of North Korean troops on the battlefield in Ukraine. Their inexperience showed in the beginning, but they are adapting. Their human wave tactics are similar to Russian assaults on other fronts that we’ve seen earlier in the war. But they’ve led to hundreds and possibly thousands, by some estimates, being killed by Ukrainian defenders. I asked Colonel Dutko about how this carnage affects his soldiers’ psyche.
Lt. Col. Dutko: (From video.) The impact – the psychological impact, and the mindset because – it’s very difficult to answer, you know, because each person will have different approach and different personal philosophy on this. They change – they change a lot by – you know, that’s less aggression because they should do it because to protect ourselves and close people.
Col. Pence: As we look at this, let’s discuss how this is similar to past conflicts and how should modern militaries prepare their soldiers and leaders to deal with this type of reality on the modern battlefield?
Major Connable: I’ll just say, as someone who struggles to speak with really poor Arabic, I’m sympathetic to the colonel, you know, putting those thoughts forward. I think what he was trying to say is that when you’re faced with these human wave tactics, specifically by the North Koreans, it can affect your own aggression, right? You become perhaps more defensive. I hope I wasn’t misreading what he was trying to say. And very clearly these North Korean troops – I think it’s important to differentiate that these – the first tranche that were sent in this 10,000 or 12,000, were special operators. They’re probably handpicked for their political dedication. We’ve already seen a lot of evidence of their dedication, the way that they’ve crossed the open battlefield en masse – very traditional North Korean tactics, though. And this is what they taught the Iraqis – I’m sorry, the Iranians.
And we see the psychological impact in previous cases, where the same tactics were applied. So I did a study of Iraqi Army will to fight. And in the Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi soldiers were – they’re psychologically devastated by having to kill so many of these people. And we’re seeing that now too. I was reading a report recently of Ukrainians having to pull their machine gunners off the line because they were killing so many of these North Koreans. So there are all sorts of ways in which these kinds of very extreme behaviors can affect you psychologically.
Col. Cancian: I think I’d add two points. One is something that came from S.L.A. Marshall’s studies in the Second World War. Now, his scholarship has been criticized, but one of the points he made was that only a relatively small number of soldiers actually fired their weapons. And that, you know, units have depended heavily on that relatively small number. And in your articles there was an example of that, where there were, you know, 10 Ukrainians in some position, and only three or four – led by, I think, of a brigade commander or something – you know, were actually fighting. And it was – this was the problem about, you know, getting people – you know, your soldiers to shoot other people.
My second point, a little different though, is looking at the North Koreans. One thing the United States does pretty well is work with coalitions and allies. Clearly, the Russians are not doing a very good job of that. We have become very accustomed to it. And we’re able to bring other forces into our operations. Not perfectly, but pretty effectively, and not having these kinds of problems that the Russians are having with the North Koreans.
Lt. Gen. Barno: Yeah, I think two thoughts there. One is that the psychological impact of killing is probably underestimated, especially killing masses of your adversary out there. Dr. Bensahel, who you mentioned at the beginning, and I co-teach a course on the human face of battle. We have an entire lesson on killing on the battlefield, the psychology of killing, because it’s so devastating on those that are pulling the triggers. And I think you saw an element of that with Colonel Dutko as he talked about that. How do you instill the resilience, and the will to continue to fight – to be able to recognize the devastation you’re wreaking, even in a just cause, even in an existential war – how do you instill that in your force before you get into the war? And that’s something the U.S. military dances around often but doesn’t actually often, in my experience at least, take on, you know, frontally when we’re preparing soldiers to fight.
I think the other thing that’s concerning too, on a different level entirely, is that this is the first time the North Koreans have actually been in a war since 1953. And they are going to learn from this as well, and bring that back home to how they are going to prepare to fight South Korea and the United States should that, you know, terrible eventuality ever happen. So it’s worrisome that they’re now exporting this product, because they’re going to bring back lessons, firsthand lessons, from the war in Ukraine. And it may transform the North Korean military to be more capable than it is today, which is a worrisome thought.
Col. Pence: That’s right. We had a great discussion together today. And as we – I’d like to give everybody a chance to give some concluding remarks. And I’d like to start with our guest from Kiev – I’m sorry, Kyiv, Colonel Dutko.
Lt. Col. Dutko: (From video.) There are three years of full invasion of 10 years’ war. That’s why it’s – we don’t have any options but to the end, because I won’t just sink away.
Col. Pence: Close, very brief remarks from Colonel Dutko. I’ll also go with Colonel Cancian.
Col. Cancian: Sure. A couple of things. We’ve talked a lot about surprise. And one point I would make is that surprise is inevitable. In fact, the title of the report was “Coping with Surprise.” In fact, if you look at the cover it started with avoiding, but I realized that was not possible. And so it says avoiding is scratched out. Coping with surprise, because it’s going to happen. Coming again back to adaptation.
The second thing that’s come up, which is an interesting issue for the future, is a world where precision is less useful because we’re seeing so much jamming, so many countermeasures. It’s not that precision is going to go away, but the tools that we have assumed we’re going to have – Excalibur artillery shell, GPS guided – the Ukrainians don’t use it anymore because of all the jamming. So this is a step that United States hasn’t faced, but I think is going to be a challenge in the next conflict.
And the final thing is the dog that didn’t bark, and that is cyber. And it’s not that cyber was not an issue here. There’s been a lot of back and forth. The defenses that the Ukrainians put in place turned out to be quite effective, and then their work with civilian firms, you know, like Google and many of the others, you know, was very effective. But if you go back and look at the literature before the wars, you know, people were saying, oh, the wars will be decided by the ones and zeros before the first shot is even fired. And there’s been nothing remotely like that. So I think we also have to watch for things that didn’t happen, as well as the things that happened.
Col. Pence: Right, the absence of General Barno.
Lt. Gen. Barno: I think it reminds me of the quote that war is still the final argument of kings. That war still exists. It’s still going to be bloody. It’s still going to be force on force. It’s not going to be ones and zeros. It’s not going to be preordained based upon who has the bigger military or the best technology at the beginning of the war. Coming back to Colonel Cancian’s point, this is really – for the U.S. military, the big takeaway for me is adaptation. Are you preparing today’s U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, Space Force to rapidly adapt once you arrive in a conflict that doesn’t look like the one you were planning?
The U.S. military invests more probably than any military in the world in planning, in preparation for fights that it can imagine. What about the fights it doesn’t imagine? How much time and energy and effort gets put into instilling a culture of rapid adaptation once you get in a battle where things don’t look like what you expected, and aren’t the plans that you have made, take you offline from all of your anticipated outcomes? How do you make sure the force can quickly adjust to that? The Ukrainians have proved the masters of this. The Russians are rapidly catching up. I don’t think the U.S. has had to exercise that muscle in a long time. And I find that worrisome. And I think that should be one of the top priorities of the military going forward here in this country.
Col. Pence: Right, and that’s insightful because that ability to adapt, or the failure to adapt, has an effect on the soldiers on the ground and how they experience warfare.
Major Connable: If you ever – if ask somebody who’s ever served in uniform or still in uniform, how good are we learning lessons from wars? I think the answer is generally, not terribly good. And I’m being kind. To be fair to the U.S. military, though, they immediately implemented this enormous Ukraine lessons learned program in stride, as the war was occurring. There’s a huge amount of effort that’s been put into trying to understand how the battlefield is perhaps changing.
I would argue that there’s less emphasis on trying to understand how the battlefield has stayed the same. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But one of the things that we really need to think about if we’re going to learn from this is that we need to pay attention to the people as much, or, I would argue, more than the things. And the more people that we can get out into the battlefield and really absorb these things firsthand, to conduct interviews, to draw lessons from the humans that are involved in the war, the more we’re actually going to learn.
Col. Cancian: If I can have the last word. I’m reminded of a quotation from an Army officer named Fehrenbach after the Korean War. And he made the comment that if you want to control territory – you can fly over it, you can sail around it. But if you really want to control it, occupy it, then you have to do it the same way the Roman legions did. That is, by sending your soldiers into the mud and to take control of it. And I think we’re, again, seeing that in this war.
Col. Pence: That’s a perfect way to end this panel discussion. Thank you all for your participation here today and being available. This has been a really insightful experience for me, and I think all of our viewers. This has been the Human Domain Panel of the Conflict in Focus: Lessons from the Russia-Ukraine War. Thank you for joining us.
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