Ukraine And The Scout's Way Of War
Combat has always been defined by the basic loop of find target-kill target. Drones, satellites, and networks have created a landscape defined by two dominant species: spotters and shooters.
A Bottom-Up Approach To Combined Arms Operations
The Ukraine War has demonstrated an urgent need for defense professionals in democratic countries to reconsider standing theories of warfighting. Like no conflict before, Putin’s assault on Ukraine has shown the power of distributed, democratized action.
If war is a continuation of policy, as Clausewitz put it, then warfighters are the people who handle the details of its execution. In the real world, the combined activities of everyone involved in an operation are what actually make policy. The further someone is from a crisis, the less they actually know about the situation frontline personnel have to cope with.
With the alienation of distance does come an important benefit: the ability to approach problems in a cold, rational, scientific way. This is extremely useful, but it is very dangerous to privilege a distant perspective over a more personal one when people’s lives are on the line.
Unfortunately, most historians and scholars of leadership have a strong tendency to favor top-down explanations that minimize the autonomy of front line individuals. This is a serious flaw in most US and broader NATO military thinking and a dangerous strategic vulnerability. Leaders are unable to accept that they are just a cog in the great machine, the same as any line soldier. They are deeply uncomfortable with according true autonomy to subordinates, fearing the consequences of losing control.
Trouble is, in warfare control is always an illusion. On the front lines chaos reigns and all plans are soon rendered void. Survival, to say nothing of completing a given mission, utterly depends on the capacity to adapt. This is as much material as mental.
Networks and drones have made the task of surviving near the front lines an order of magnitude more challenging. They also make some leaders believe that they have far more direct control over those under their command than is really the case. A net effect of this dynamic is that operations involving a lot of moving parts tend to go wrong more often than right.
Ukraine’s counteroffensives of 2023 didn’t pan out partly due to lack of resources, but also because the battlefield had evolved in the space of just six months. It is no longer possible to charge through a properly defended area and achieve an operational breakthrough relying on mass and surprise. One failed ruscist offensive after another has proven that when large numbers of troops move near the contact zone, they’re easily spotted.
To liberate its territory, Ukraine has to come up with a doctrine that can square the circle of achieving surprise while under constant observation. Mass must be generated through the delivery of precise and sustained firepower with a minimum of force presence near the contact point, much like in an amphibious operation. An attack has to create shock through comprehensive targeting of the hostile force in a defined area, enabling constant pressure from ground teams that seek to isolate and destroy subordinate elements until the broader organization can no longer resist.
The solution to modern operations is not, in most cases, to scale up operations so that multiple brigades and thousands of troops are attacking the enemy at once, but to scale them down and make pressure persistent. A useful model is the style of personal duel Frank Herbert described in the Dune book series. Shields make it impossible to shoot an opponent or even whack at them with a sword or spear. Only slow-moving objects can slip past the shield, transforming combat into a kind of methodical dance where patience is required, each combatant trying to engineer an opening in their enemy’s guard.
The most important resource in modern warfare is information: knowing what capabilities your opponent has available and where they are located. With perfect information about a landscape comes the ability to anticipate enemy moves with such accuracy that they can be efficiently countered. Friction can be applied to every level of the hostile system to encourage it to defeat itself, wasting energy until a fatal vulnerability is exposed.
No one can ever have perfect information. But it is possible to fight for more and better data than the enemy. The best way to get it is active reconnaissance.
This insight is ancient - one of the defining traits of any effective commander is a commitment to employing scouts. Truth be told, the concept of firepower ultimately devolves into two components: having something appropriate to contribute and knowing where it needs to strike. It’s the same whether you’re talking spears two thousand years ago or guided missiles today.
You need trust to leverage the connection properly, though. Leadership paradigms like the famous German aufstragtaktik, half-applied in the US as Mission Command, evolved from this understanding.
Drones and networks allow a spotter to give precise, real-time targeting data to shooters who can be located anywhere in range. Both can spend most of their time hiding, risking movement and exposure only when covered by adequate support. All frontline soldiers are now essentially scouts, with those behind them offering fire support or acting as enablers having to adopt similar techniques in order to survive.
In a very real sense, modern combat cuts out several layers of middlemen that once separated a scout from their general behind the lines. Truth be told, scouts can now be the generals, with capable staff officers handling support elements far from the point of contact while staying in close contact using networks.
A team of scouts can lurk in a covered position and tell shooters what to destroy without revealing themselves. This makes fighting them a real challenge, forcing the enemy to actively clear or suppress all the potential hides in a given area.
During my military service some two decades back I spent a lot of time in the field with veteran cavalry scouts old enough to have been junior enlisted personnel during the Cold War. They had all experienced Iraq too, so the contrast between Cold War exercises and the realities of counterinsurgency were palpable. Recruits like me were treated to a unique mix of both mentalities in our training.
Naturally, these dudes had some incredible stories to share. Most had experienced field training scenarios where an opposing force had accidentally literally set up camp around them. You’d be amazed at what people won’t see if there’s no movement or sound and they’re distracted by other tasks. As most military gear makes a ton of noise, staying silent in the brush can effectively make you invisible. Thermal optics make hiding more difficult, but they have their limits, with thermal blankets highly effective if what’s underneath isn’t moving around.
Not only does being able to sometimes overhear conversations between unsuspecting soldiers or even officers come in handy, but most military units really dislike accurate artillery fire landing nearby, even if only simulated. In the confusion a scout team can often sneak away with valuable info.
I am not arguing that every military institution should reform to have only scouts, artillery, and the support elements keeping both in the field. Far from it: the Scout’s Way of War envisions scouting as the primary activity of all frontline combat units. Instead of dedicated recon formations supporting heavier elements, it’s the other way around.
It’s the mentality of the scout that really matters, because survival on the battlefield depends on maintaining access to the entire array of combined arms capabilities. But to avoid being quickly located and attacked, combat teams have to operate in a highly distributed fashion, trusting to stealth and mobility to keep out of harms way while calling in accurate fires on anything worthwhile in sight.
The customary pace and focus of offensive operations will necessarily have to change. Instead of concentrated thrusts through the enemy front in an effort to segment hostile forces and collapse the defense across a wide area, the goal will be to transform portions of the frontline into sandpaper that slowly eats away at the enemy’s capabilities.
Destruction of the enemy’s combat power is of paramount importance, and this is best done by drawing it into losing fights on a broad scale. Storm Brigades equipped with modern gear and staffed by experienced soldiers will set out to perpetually expand the grey zone between the front lines. Instead of seizing enemy positions and holding them against counterattacks, Ukrainian forces will act in a purely opportunistic manner, inflicting maximum casualties however this can best be accomplished.
Ukraine will also chase battered ruscist units around, taking advantage of Moscow’s need to keep lots of bodies on Ukrainian soil to prevent a repeat of what happened in Kharkiv two years ago. Instead of rotating damaged units back to ruscist home turf, they tend to go to a less active front. As Ukraine’s strength grows over the next six months, it should gain the ability to continually generate new opportunities to deal unequal damage.
Ultimately, this will lead to orc collapses across entire sectors. Rushing troops in to prevent Ukraine from exploiting a breach will leave another area vulnerable, and the process will repeat until something important breaks.
This is systems destruction warfare done from the bottom-up, as opposed to top-down, as Beijing prefers. There are two critical challenges in implementing this approach in Ukraine. First is lack of modern weapons. Second is a simple and coherent doctrine that can be put into practice by multiple brigades in a short period of time.
The first is in the hands of elected officials in the USA and Europe (gods help us all). The second anyone can help develop if they’ve the knowledge base. This post can only offer an overview of a full doctrine built up from first principles. But many of the ideas can be adapted by folks closer to the front than I’ll hopefully ever be.
More and more, soldiers on the front lines in Ukraine are having to fight like I was trained to as a scout almost twenty years ago: dispersed, isolated, and relying on accurate firepower delivered remotely. A scout team doesn’t have the luxury of tolerating casualties because it’s small and usually close to hostile fire. Scouts must combine stealth, speed, and surprise to remain out of the line of fire while still launching vicious ambushes that sap the enemy’s strength.
Nowadays, the liminal space between armed groups that scouts and skirmishers have always inhabited is positively huge. The natural scale at which combined arms operations can function is changing, meaning that the way combat units are organized and trained must as well.
This means positive, planned adaptation. Moscow’s inability to do this well offers a case study in how not to wage modern war.
The Scout At The Front
Thanks to drones, the front line can now be covered by scattered teams of as few as four soldiers occupying a dugout in a network of trenches. They only come out to fight when drones warn of orcs incoming, and if artillery fire is already falling close they might simply hang tight and let friendly drones, mortars, grenade launchers, and tanks handle most of the defense. Hostiles that make it to the trench can be wiped out in a sortie before the soldiers return to cover or pull back.
Holding the front is ultimately about having enough of these positions staffed at sufficient depth that the enemy can’t slip infiltrators past. When attacks are big enough to break through, Ukraine can deploy reserves in similar positions a couple kilometers behind the forward ones to spring an ambush and attempt a counterattack.
The goal of defending in this manner is to maximize the cost to the enemy of mounting attacks. You let them show you where they have decided to commit resources, ceding the initiative to the defender who can then decide how they can launch the most effective ambush. If an orc attack fails you have to assume that they’ll try to wipe out defending positions with an air strike, so once revealed a position pretty much has to be evacuated within a few hours anyway - maybe sooner.
Sure, F-16s will eventually be conducting aerial ambushes that ought to push the ruscist jets away from the front, but they can’t be everywhere at once. Soldiers in forward positions don’t have the luxury of hoping a Viper will be in the area when glide bombs are heading their way.
A key advantage of defending in the Network Age is that, provided communications are maintained, a counter-move to any new threat can be organized in short order. It is possible to minimize the number of people needed in exposed positions while preserving the ability to defend an area. An extremely small number of frontline spotters can enable any shooters within range to concentrate fire on a target.
Cheap first person view drones have replicated the impact that machine guns had on warfare in the early twentieth century. The solution now as then is for combat power to be spread out. Being able to identify and repeatedly target most or all enemy positions in an area is a prerequisite for taking ground, meaning that getting good information ahead of any decisive movement is of paramount importance.
In something of an ironic paradox, command and control is now more of an illusion than ever. When the enemy commander can see your troops in real time, your orders can be anticipated. As you mass enough force to take advantage of an enemy weakness, they can figure out what it is and shore up their defenses.
What is seen can be swiftly attacked thanks to drones, whether they crash into a tank or individual themselves or simply guide ordnance in for the kill. Drones are cheap enough that they outnumber humans, and the trouble with relying on electromagnetic warfare is that unless you blank out all frequencies - hindering your own ability to communicate - they enemy will find a gap sooner or later.
Officers of today may think like they are exerting a level of control and oversight that transforms combat into a computer game, but as orc operations keep demonstrating in gory detail all this does is get people killed and equipment burned. Scientists as professionals understand just how easy it is for bias to become magnified and screw up the validity of an experiment: well hate to break it to soldiers, but every single combat action is its own dynamic experiment. Your aim to is to control as many variables as possible to keep risk levels tolerable while hedging against surprise.
I know that sounds hopelessly abstract, but it just means being prepared for the worst and having adequate reserves. Don’t overstretch. And always avoid giving information to the enemy - where possible, seed some poison pills. False documents, fake disgruntled social media accounts, that sort of thing.
The effective limit on troop density essentially transforms all combat teams into scouting detachments. There simply isn’t an advantage in pushing a large force forward when drones will make it difficult to impossible to supply. Experienced Ukrainian drone units like Magyar’s Birds prove this everywhere they fight.
A more effective approach is to patiently infiltrate a target area while developing a detailed map of the enemy presence. When the time is right, a coordinated bombardment followed by small pushes to grab a foothold or two in the enemy’s front can force an engagement on uneven terms. Positions that can be easily evacuated offer maximum flexibility in responding to the hostile response.
Armored vehicles act as a fire brigade, rushing to assist teams that get in trouble and inflict damage on the enemy while evacuating them to safety. Instead of leading or accompanying dismounted scouts, they push forward briefly to cover retreats to minimize their exposure to enemy drones. This is coordinated with drone and fire support to inflict maximum enemy casualties and dominate the battlespace for a brief time.
After the fighting dies down, the enemy is carefully monitored and harassed to make the cost of reoccupying or rebuilding damaged positions as high as possible. The net effect should be a steady expansion of the gray zone that allows Ukrainian troops more latitude to decide where they will focus the next strike. When the enemy is unable to adequately respond, occupation of positions in depth can occur rapidly and with little warning, followed soon after by renewed probes.
The scout practices a way of war that takes nothing for granted, assumes the enemy always holds a superior position, and aims to keep personnel under cover as much as possible to deny the enemy information about their location and strength. Scouts operate in a world of two basic states: in or out of cover. If you move, shoot, or stay in one place for too long, you are out of cover and can expect to come under attack. When that happens, only speed plus sufficient armor to survive whatever you can’t outrun keeps you alive.
For a scout, communication is the ultimate lifeline. A scout in cover can call for accurate fire support without giving away their position. This lets them direct multiple accurate strikes against enemy forces without exposing themselves, forcing the enemy to expend tremendous effort to locate and suppress the position. So long as a scout can get even a text message with map coordinates to someone else with a weapon able to reach the desired spot, they can contribute to a fight.
Drones extend a scout’s ability to spot and select targets to an unprecedented degree, and remote weapons stations will increasingly allow them to use direct fire from a safe distance. Thermal blankets capable of allowing one or two people to lie still and blend in with the ground on infrared sensors can keep positions shrouded at night.
The trick is taking tactics more commonly associated with defending territory and apply them to moving forward. Fortunately, the lack of troop density along the front line cuts two ways: while Muscovite forces can also efficiently defend large spaces with relatively few troops in theory, the relative inefficiency of most frontline orcs in combat gives Ukraine an opportunity to inflicted lopsided casualties in numerous tactical engagements.
At the tactical level, anyone’s ability to move is dictated by how many enemy firing positions are capable of taking a shot if they do. The purpose of encircling an enemy has always been as much to convince them that holding a position is hopeless and choose retreat voluntarily as to outright wipe them out. That is why Sun Tzu advised never cutting off an enemy’s sole path of escape: despair can make a defeated army fight to the death when a tiny hope of escape can induce a nearly intact one facing a severe shock to turn tail and run.
Operations in the Network Age have to accept a highly fluid, dynamic battlespace where small teams actively create gaps in the enemy’s front that leave entire enemy units vulnerable to sudden annihilation. For anyone who has ever trained as a frontline scout, this is a familiar world. Scouts live with an extremely low margin for error, yet can also provide the exact information needed to save a lot of friendly lives.
The weakness of a scout team, of course, is a lack of staying power. A single casualty is crippling, because forget what you see in movies: rarely is a single soldier able to drag or carry another out of the line of fire without help. Body armor is heavy, and so is ammunition.
That’s why drones that can handle resupply and evacuation duties are essential and need to be widely deployed. They also have another advantage: cheap clearing of antipersonnel mines. Drones can be driven across the gray zone to locate safe walking routes so frequently that their appearance won’t warn the enemy that anything unusual is planned. Clearing multiple routes through the gray zone is necessary, but large-scale explosive demolition can only be employed when armored vehicles must be deployed to extract troops in danger or the enemy is unable to adequately respond because they’ve already been pushed back.
Nothing about the nature of war has changed, only the available tools. Successful military action depends on effective organization at the proper scale. Disrupt your enemy’s ability to put all the diverse pieces of a combined arms op together, and weaknesses will emerge that can be ruthlessly exploited.
At what is usually called the tactical level of warfare, fights are all about teams in contact trying to survive while accomplishing a mission that usually entails some degree of control over space. Operations seek to combine tactical engagements in such a way that the battalion or brigade fielding the platoons and companies frontline enemy forces are organized into so that logical areas of responsibility are assigned loses control of the situation.
If an operation gains momentum, it means it is successively displacing enemy forces, potentially defeating the enemy’s strength across a broader area with the application of additional resource. A strategic breakthrough will occur when a series of operations combine to force the enemy to cede control of space sufficient that its own strategy is impaired.
The existential challenge for leaders at every level is coming up with a means of overpowering the enemy then moving too swiftly for the other side to adapt. This is what military professionals will sometimes refer to as getting inside the enemy’s decision loop.
At every level, individuals and groups are constantly evaluating new information and deciding how to respond. They observe the situation, orient their thinking towards how events impact their goals, choose a course of action, then implement it. Each time through the loop everyone involved learns a little bit more about the other players, which tends to structure these interactions over time. If this structure is broken, it takes time to construct a new order, giving an opponent space to make a move.
The main difference between the battlefield of today and even a decade ago is the speed at which a target can be attacked. Every movement is a risk, every delay potentially fatal. However, it also means that if you are able to establish drone superiority over an area, fire and air support can slowly make it impossible for the enemy to maintain troops there.
That makes it possible for small teams to essentially extend no-man’s zone five or even ten kilometers from friendly lines. With Moscow determined to constantly push troops forward to hit Ukrainian positions whether it’s launching an offensive operation or just mounting local counterattacks, Putin’s forces are opened up to being constantly ground down on multiple fronts. Isolated from supplies and support, they become effective prisoners.
Given enough drones, armored vehicles, modern jets, artillery shells, and trained personnel, by this fall Ukraine should be able to begin launching numerous tactical level attacks that draw the orcs into a strategic trap. The goal is to induce the maximum possible drain on ruscist resources while minimizing the risk to Ukraine’s troops. Liberation of large tracts of territory come when Moscow is forced to withdraw under pressure for fear of large numbers of troops being stuck in place and destroyed.
Combined Arms Rethought
Taking a scout’s approach to the problem of advancing might sound counterintuitive, but it’s basically how most of Ukraine’s boldest successes have come about so far. Small but well equipped groups need to map out enemy formations and draw them into a fight characterized by constant ambushes and bombardment.
Ukrainian troops will aggressively probe and raid a sector until the enemy responds. As it does, Ukraine’s troops can work to inflict as much damage as possible, ideally drawing the enemy into launching opportunistic counterattacks that walk into planned traps. If Moscow sends in enough reinforcements to make these tactics too dangerous, Ukraine dials down the tempo of operations and shifts its efforts to another sector.
In my general design concept for expanded Ukrainian brigades, a company of 100 personnel is the basic building block for operations. The objective is to create a tactical level organism capable of essentially feeling its way through the enemy front, acting with high degree of autonomy but under the umbrella of fire, air defense, and drone support.
It’s a battlefield machine built for active reconnaissance - fighting for information. A full Battlegroup, of which there would be three in each expanded brigade, would be organized into six distinct battalions - three Line, and one each Fires, Defense, and Services, like so:
Line Battalions: (4) Line companies, (1) Fires company, (1) Support company
Fires Battalion: (2) Howitzer companies, (2) Drone Strike companies, (1) Support company.
Defense Battalion: Pioneer, Engineer, Air Defense, Drone Defense, Special Forces, Admin companies.
Services Battalion: Field Hospital, Maintenance, Logistics, Replacement, Security, Headquarters companies.
Every company has around 100 personnel with 10 duty and 10 utility vehicles. Line companies get 2 tanks, 6 APCs, and 2 IFVs each. The various other companies commit elements to support Line Companies on demand. The Line Company teams work together to exert active control out to 2km along a 2km front in open country. Two Line Companies working together can cover a 5km section of the front against a ruscist force as large as a battalion, given appropriate support.
In the field, when intelligence reveals an area of the orc front is thinly held or hosts a recuperating unit, a Storm Battlegroup positioned in the vicinity can initiate a limited offensive effort on its own initiative. Rather than tip Ukraine’s hand by building up large forces ahead of a classic sustained assault across a wide front, these Battlegroups will instead lurk until the time is right to engage in an intensive pulse of operations.
At the tip of the spear, pushes into the enemy’s front will involve several Line Companies simultaneously moving forward up to several kilometers backed by heavy fire support to destroy any ruscist positions they identify. The objective is not to seize ground so much as provoke a response while doing damage to enemy units near the front.
These attacks will be patient and methodical, involving individual squads creeping along a tree line to take up forward positions unnoticed, if possible. Their supporting vehicles hang back to avoid tipping off the enemy, moving in only when the dismounted squads need direct fire support. They are used mainly to destroy enemy positions and withdraw the advance teams without loss, not dig in and hold ground.
An enemy commander will then face a choice: send troops to replace those lost and retake the position, or abandon the area and risk Ukraine digging in. In the latter case, Ukraine gains effective control over the area and the ability to use it to stage for a deeper push. In the former, Ukrainian troops get to decide how to inflict the most damage they can: hold or retreat, pulling the enemy into a trap.
Once a target unit is forced to react, it will reveal a great deal of useful information about itself. As enemy troops and gear move, they can be tracked to map out the enemy’s physical infrastructure in an area. Depots, headquarters, or anything else that a few HIMARS rockets or JDAM/Hammer bombs will knock out can be struck by sudden, intense barrages across the depth of the enemy’s positions. This in turn will create opportunities for additional Line Companies to move in to inflict more damage while the enemy is recovering.
Simply forcing Moscow to re-staff front line units over and over will be a win in and of itself. It’s already losing more people than it can draft. In cases where Ukrainian commanders assess that the enemy is sufficiently confused and vulnerable across a wider area, a more sustained period of deeper ground attacks can seek to rupture a broad front.
The way I propose structuring a standard Storm Battlegroup, four out of twelve Line Companies can be perpetually allocated to the front line, rotating when tired. Each active Line Company will have dedicated support from a range of weapons, including at least 2-4 each:
Automatic grenade launchers, essentially machine guns firing explosive projectiles, good to about 2km.
105mm, 120mm, or 125mm tank guns, able to crack apart opposing vehicles and bunkers out to 2-3km.
60mm-82mm mortars, small portable artillery systems with a range of around 5km.
Small FPV drones with a range of up to 5km.
Larger strike drones, range 20km or more.
155mm howitzers firing unitary or cluster rounds up to 30km, 40km with special ammo.
Additionally, air support from Ukrainian MiG-29s and Su-25s tossing glide bombs from as close as 20km behind the front lines should be at least intermittently available. With laser guidance, these weapons can be used to support troops on the front line, cracking targets that artillery shells can’t, like bunkers. This assumes, of course, that Ukraine gets enough Patriot batteries and F-16s to hold back ruscist interceptors operating on their side of the front lines. And ATACMS missiles to keep ruscist long range SAM systems away.
Generally speaking, a Line Company that goes into Storm mode will seek to advance no more than one or two kilometers in a day, if that. As resistance increases the Company leader will have to decide when to halt or pull back. The combined action of multiple Line Companies and their supporting elements across the area of responsibility assigned to a single battlegroup should pull an entire orc regiment or brigade into the equivalent of a wood chipper.
On the surface, it might seem like this approach violates one of the classic demands of effective operations: concentration of force. I contend that technology requires that this concept be re-scaled. The goal is always the annihilation of the enemy’s combat power. This is best accomplished by treating its deployed formations as cooperative organisms that are collectively weakened whenever one is smashed.
The scope of most operations need to be miniaturized. To avoid frittering away resources different teams must always coordinate their activities, altering the pattern and rhythm of attacks while aiming at a common focal point. The movement of brigades and even battalions eliminates uncertainty in the enemy’s mind about your intentions, so smaller levels of organization have to become the fount of battlefield dynamism.
To conduct operations like this demands highly trained troops with the full range of support they need to pick fights and win without taking a costly punch in return. Local commanders also need the autonomy to decide when and where to strike and the ability to cede territory in exchange for enemy casualties.
Obviously there are no risk or cost free ways of waging war - missions will go bad and people will die. But by enabling frontline personnel to have friends quickly strike any target they spot, slowly distortions of the ruscist front created by fingers of the grey zone constantly intruding into their defensive scheme will be felt as mounting pressure across a broad sector.
By taking a switch on/switch off approach across multiple fronts and sectors within them, Moscow won’t be able to easily predict where a push might suddenly intensify, creating the conditions for achieving a level of surprise. And in the process of moving reserves around to hedge against Ukrainian breakthroughs, the orcs will expose their war machine on the occupied territories to deep strikes.
From the scout’s perspective, victory or defeat usually comes down to the availability of accurate fire support. A scout doesn’t need any weapon other than a radio or even secure text to pick out a target for prompt destruction. At least, if the tools and training are in place.
The best way to seize territory is to have the enemy voluntarily leave, not have infantry clear ever patch of dirt. Military operations are impossible if the people in frontline positions lack food, water, and ammo. To advance with minimal casualties demands patience and the ability to scale actions appropriately. Creating a zone ten kilometers into enemy-held territory where any troops they send will wind up trapped and starving will enable sudden movements of the established front that absorb the target area and allow the process to start all over again.
If this is happening to Moscow on four, five or six different fronts at once, the net effect of these geographically separate campaigns is to force it into an endless series of costly losing fights. Once it can’t sustain the defense everywhere, the way Putin’s system works one part after another will eventually be starved of resources and left vulnerable to collapse.
This is the essence of systems destruction warfare. Which is the very technique that China aims to employ against the USA in the coming war America seems bound and determined to stumble into on Beijing’s terms.
Conclusion - Systems Destruction Warfare, Anarchist Style
It’s useful to think of my systems destruction approach as an anarchist counter to China’s. The objective is to create the smallest sustainable independent battlefield organism with the full spectrum of capabilities. It is able to act autonomously while always communicating with other cells to achieve combined effects.
Basically, if my opponent aims to break apart my command structure to induce paralysis, I make sure that even if I’m out of contact my people will devise a way to win the day. You come at my forces, it’ll be like wading through quicksand.
Over the past two and a half years I’ve seen evidence of many Ukrainian brigades operating in a similar manner. I’ve often called it the Cossack style of warfare, but it’s common to any group that relies on a combination of mobility and tactical overmatch to wreak havoc on their foes. Vikings, pirates, Mongol hordes, and even modern special forces teams embrace the style.
If you deny information to your enemy, they will tend to make more mistakes. The side that makes the fewest blunders usually wins. All combat is ultimately about removing an opponent’s ability to resist by taking away vital capabilities.
The primary downside of this style of fighting is that it demands highly motivated and trained people with the proper gear. Ukraine has the first covered and is getting there with the second. It still needs a lot of help with the third.
And the clock is ticking, because Putin can’t be counted on to drain his own strength to no end forever. If he ever does make a proper strategic level adaptation, Ukraine’s fight for liberation will take that much longer.
Make no mistake: this war will now continue until one regime or the other falls. Ukraine is already laying the groundwork for rebellions against Moscow across the russian world. It is patiently and deliberately identifying what it can do to inflict pain on the invader that weakens it on the battlefield.
The Scout’s Way of War doesn’t in fact recognize any front lines. There are only places with more targets and less, each with its own value to the war effort. Ultimately, they're all important to attack. The order of operations depends solely on how much they cost in blood.
And because the enemy can’t be strong everywhere, victory at the lowest cost depends on finding weak spots. These may now exist primarily at the level of the individual tree line or town, but they’re there. As Ukraine’s firepower increases, they’ll emerge.