Armies will be able to maneuver on battlefields again, but it’s going to be difficult and bloody

• The Ukraine war raises a difficult question: Can armies maneuver to win anymore?
• Artillery, mines, and drones are so costly they risk exhausting an offensive before a breakthrough.
• An influential think tank believes it has a solution, but it’s not going to be easy.

“Firepower kills,” warned the French General Philippe Pétain just prior to the First World War. He worried that the would-be Napoleons of 1914, who dreamed of sweeping maneuvers and crushing victories, ignored a crucial possibility: that troops moving in the open would be mown down by artillery and machine guns.

Pétain was proved right: firepower became so lethal that the armies of World War I dug deeply into the earth just to survive, until new weapons — notably the tank — broke the trench deadlock. But a century later, warfare has come full circle: drones, artillery and guided munitions have made movement so hazardous that both armies in Ukraine have reverted to trench warfare. Even Ukrainian forces in the recent Kursk offensive, which used mechanized maneuver to seize nearly 500 miles of Russian territory, are now digging in.

Whether in 1914 or 2024, there is a downside to a firepower-centric strategy: it tends to lead toward indecisive battles of attrition. Firepower can sweep the ground, but it can’t occupy it. At some point, victory requires offensive maneuver to encircle opposing forces and sever supply lines.

But is a maneuver strategy even possible anymore?

A US think tank believes it has a solution for Ukraine as well as better armed Western militaries. By temporarily suppressing the defensive drone-artillery combo that has proven so devastating in the Russo-Ukraine War, armies can again maneuver to defeat their enemies.

“This task is feasible,” argues the report by the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

“It requires imagination, innovation, and iteration. It requires experimentation with battlefield concepts as well as with technology and tactics.”

ISW sees three problems with trying to maneuver in Ukraine, lessons that broadly apply to modern battlefields. First, Ukraine and Russia field armies large enough to cover the front without leaving gaps or open flanks, which means that an attacker usually has to assault through fortified lines (the study was written prior to Ukraine’s thrust across the little-defended Russian border into Kursk). But drones, artillery, mines and other weapons have made penetrating enemy defenses so costly that the attacker becomes too exhausted to exploit a breakthrough. And even if the attacker can punch a hole, the defender usually has enough resources to build fortified positions, sealing off the penetration and forcing the attacker to repeat the process.

This exactly describes the situation on the First World War’s Western Front, a comparison made by Ukraine’s top general after the 2023 counter-offensive. But modern technology has added a new twist: drones and guided munition in what ISW calls — based on a Cold War-era Soviet concept — the “tactical reconnaissance strike complex.”

“The TRSC is the combination of pervasive tactical reconnaissance, primarily by drone; drone-corrected precision artillery fire; precision munitions delivered by fixed- and/or rotary-wing aircraft; drone-launched precision munitions; and large numbers of FPV [first-person view] loitering munitions,” ISW explained. While both the attacker and defender can use the TRSC, it is the attacker who must break cover and expose himself in the open.

In this conception, the TRSC is dynamic, a cat-and-mouse game where each side seeks to jam the links between enemy drones and their operators, while constantly updating their own drone systems to beat jamming. For Ukraine — or the US — to launch successful ground offensives, it will need to exploit “fleeting technological advantages to disrupt the defender’s TRSC in support of the initial penetration operation and to sustain the advantage long enough to create a moving envelope that protects exploitation forces through to their planned culmination and transition to the defensive having secured their objectives.”

In other words, the assault force needs to be protected by jammers and air defenses as it rumbles a path through the enemy’s defenses.

Some Western experts advocate the creation of mobile “bubbles” in which troops would safely move under the protection of jammers, anti-drone weapons and other defensive systems. “The requirement is not to destroy them [drones] permanently or universally,” the ISW report said. “Temporarily suppressing the local TRSC will require combining the EW [electronic warfare] and other counter-drone capabilities described above with effective counter-battery fire and other capabilities to suppress traditional artillery alongside effective tactical air defense against fixed- and rotary-wing attack aviation in pre-determined sectors to permit the concentration first of penetration and then of exploitation forces.”

However, the attacker must also take care that it only disrupts enemy drones, and not friendly ones as well. “EW systems must thus be designed and operated in a way that does not suppress all drone activity in the attack sector,” ISW noted. That’s still a work in progress for Ukraine, which also lacks the advanced EW disruptors that can defend wide areas of the battlefield.

The debate over whether armies can still maneuver also turns on a capability hardly available to Ukraine: fighter jets that provide close air support. Its new F-16s are mostly flying far from the front to avoid the Russian surface-to-air missile batteries that have gutted its air force. In contrast, debates about the US Army’s ability to maneuver may turn on questions about the effectiveness of its attack helicopters and Air Force planes like the A-10 Thunderbolt and the AC-130 Ghostrider.

Ukraine may be able to compensate for its lack of airpower by using drones and ground-launched long-range rockets to perform close air support, as well as battlefield air interdiction to hit Russian reinforcements and supply columns just behind the front line and isolate the defenders. “Ukrainian forces will have to find ways to use the drone and missile strike systems it has to generate the effects of BAI and CAS in direct support of the penetration battle and the exploitation phase of each offensive operation,” ISW said.

Even though Ukrainian forces are outnumbered by the Russians, Ukraine can also use shrewd tactics to restore maneuver warfare, ISW contends. For example, Ukrainian forces can judge the “culminating point” of Russian offensives, when the attack begins to run out of steam and the attacker is vulnerable to a sharp, well-timed counterattack. Such a “backhand blow” strategy was used with some success by German mechanized forces to stop Soviet offensives in World War II, though ultimately the panzer divisions were worn down.

Regardless of whether ISW’s concept is viable, the cyclical pattern of military history suggests that the luster of firepower will eventually fade, and maneuver will once again become ascendant. “The long history of war makes clear that maneuver will ultimately be restored to the battlefield despite the current challenges,” ISW concluded.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.