One of the reasons that Ukraine has proved so successful this year in slowing Russia’s advance in the east of the country has been the creation of a “kill zone” encompassing the terrain that the invaders would have to cover. I discussed this in a recent article I wrote for the magazine about Ukraine:
I asked one veteran [in Kyiv] how fighting had changed since 2022. After the drones started appearing in force, the battlefield had, he said, turned into “hell.” “There was nowhere to hide.” The Ukrainians may have the edge, but the Russians have their drones too.
The result has been to create a “kill zone” over and beyond the line of contact where the Russian and Ukrainian armies meet (and any no-man’s-land in between), making any movement in this area extremely dangerous and creating something very close to stalemate. Ukraine now claims that, mainly owing to drone attacks, Russian troop losses (killed or seriously wounded) are running at about the rate it is thought Russia is able to recruit, around 30,000 a month.
Some American troops have now gone through a training exercise in which they were given a taste of what drone warfare is like. The exercise was designed to see how they could cope with the small, short-range drones that play a key role in “policing” the Ukrainian kill zone. The answer was not very well.
The Wall Street Journal covered the exercise in a story here. Ukrainian drone operators “eliminated” a U.S. armored brigade in the exercise and did so at such a pace that the U.S. vehicles “had to be sent back into the exercises as new units, or “re-spawned,” to keep the exercise going.”
It should be said that something similar had happened in earlier exercises when the Ukrainians had “fought” other NATO units. Of course, by now the Ukrainians (and, it should be said, the Russians) have had great deal of experience in this type of warfare, which NATO forces have not. The good news is that the performance of the U.S. troops improved as the exercise was re-run and “they became more adept at dispersing and concealing themselves and using electronic warfare.”
Quite what this means for the future of tank warfare (and by extension defense spending priorities) is a matter of debate. Tanks will still be needed. The question is the extent to which their role will change.
Meanwhile unease, triggered in no small part by the recent intensification of Russia’s “gray zone” warfare (described here by our Jim Geraghty), is growing that the Kremlin may be close to trying something more substantial in the west. The Baltic Sentinel is reporting that Robert Brovdi (better known by his call-sign “Magyar,” the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces), is now recommending that the Baltic States set up kill zones along their frontiers with Russia and Belarus. . . .