The purpose of this paper is to stimulate a dialogue on the military aspects of the Russo- Ukrainian War with a focus on emerging trends. Compounding this benign neglect is the US Administration s ban on military, intelligence and government observers entering the conflict zone. Part of this lacuna can be attributed to a political predisposition in the West to proclaim that there is no military solution to the conflict as comforting an excuse for inaction as it is a rationale for ignoring of a military dimension that has been ruled irrelevant. 4 A third surprise is the relative lack of Western attention given to the military aspects of the Russo- Ukrainian War particularly given the unexpected scale and duration of the conflict as well as the unanticipated Russian aggressiveness in sponsoring it. Stephen Blank, The Slow Mobilization toward War with Putin, NEWSWEEK, (3 July 2015), at [accessed 3 July 2015 >.ģ Generation Warfare on Western concepts. and NATO ships in the Black Sea, moved Iskander missiles to Crimea and Kaliningrad, built up a formidable anti- access and area- denial (A2AD) force along the Russian border, conducted major Arctic exercises and continued its probes against northern European and U.S. 3 Russia has made numerous nuclear threats, buzzed U.S. This mirror imaging is misleading and it is a conceptual mistake to try to fit Russian New 1 Artis Pabriks Foreword, THE WAR IN UKRAINE: LESSONS FOR EUROPE, edited by Artis Pabriks & Andis Kudors, (Center for East European Policy Studies Riga, LVA: University of Latvia Press, 2016): p The intervention in Crimea is dated from the first over- flight and entry of Russian airmobile units on 27 January 2014 the Donbas events started with protests in February, seizures of government facilities in March, and open insurrection in April the Ukrainian government, after experimenting with an unreciprocated ceasefire in June, launched their Plan B counteroffensive on 2 July. This emerging strategy has been both under- appreciated and misunderstood often muddled with our own constructs of fourth generation warfare or non- linear warfare or hybrid war. Second, few in the West have paid much attention to Russia s doctrinal pivot toward New Generation War until its manifestation in Ukraine. If some pundit had predicted as recently as 2013, that Europe would soon be experiencing such an event, with state- on- state violence and an increasing element of East- West crisis atmospherics, 3 they would have been unceremoniously ejected from whatever future security forum had invited them. The Russo- Ukrainian War has been full of surprises. 2 Despite repeated attempts to negotiate an effective ceasefire, the struggle in Ukraine has involved the largest scale battles in Europe since the end of the Second World War. What began as a relatively bloodless superpower intervention in Crimea and morphed into a proxy separatist insurrection in the Donbas has turned into a year- long real war. 1 The military conflict between Russian and Ukraine is now in its sixteenth month. Army Capabilities Center (ARCIC) 8 July 2015Ģ It is believed that smart people learn from the mistakes of others in order to not repeat them. Karber Historical Lessons Learned Workshop sponsored by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory & U.S. 1 The Potomac Foundation DRAFT Lessons Learned from the Russo-Ukrainian War Personal Observations Dr.
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