As of: March 15, 2024, 4:46 p.m
By: Karsten Hinzmann
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Monstrous and full of pitfalls in operation: Ukraine's M1 Abrams main battle tank is becoming a highly endangered weapon thanks to the Russians' better intelligence.
© Armin Weigel/dpa
A miracle tank defeated by a puddle, artillery positions evaluated using stolen smartphones - Russia is currently learning how to crack NATO.
Kiev – “No plan survives the first contact with the enemy,” wrote the Prussian Major General Carl von Clausewitz and would feel confirmed in the Ukraine war.
“It seems that the Russians are learning,” observes Frederik Mertens, an analyst at the
Hague Center for Strategic Studies
, as quoted by
Newsweek
now .
This is bad news for the defenders, because Vladimir Putin's troops have apparently set their sights on Ukraine's gems and are targeting them with targeted fire, as
Newsweek
writes.
Russia says it has destroyed a handful of Ukraine-operated Abrams tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles as well as US-supplied HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) within the past two weeks.
Russia has developed new strategies on the battlefield that have proven effective, adds
Ivan Stupak, a former Ukrainian Security Service officer who advises the National Security, Defense and Intelligence Committee of the Ukrainian Parliament, according to
Newsweek .
This means that what the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, General Valeriy Saluschny, had already predicted last fall has come to pass: the Ukrainian defenders urgently need high technology, but the longer the trench warfare lasts, the better the Russians can adapt to it - i.e. learn from war in war.
This in turn would then equalize technological progress.
Challenger and Abrams tanks at the top of Putin's hit list
According to
Newsweek
, Abrams and Challenger tanks in particular are said to have become the first victims of Russia's new curiosity - after all, Ukraine has already lost half of its 14-strong fleet;
only partly due to enemy influence.
Modern equipment such as the Abrams tank has been used in combat for a comparatively short time because Ukraine has withheld it, says Marina Miron from the
War Studies Department
at King's College London.
Because Ukraine's ability to camouflage its key equipment is limited and heavy Western tanks are ill-suited to Ukraine's muddy terrain, Moscow has had more success destroying Kiev's equipment, she said.
Most recently, the
Sun
reported how a British Challenger sunk into the dirt due to its weight - and the world
watched on
YouTube .
And since the war of movement has been frozen for a long time, the tanks are sometimes used as howitzers from camouflaged positions;
always being put in the position at full risk.
Or as taught in the Bundeswehr.
No fire without movement and no movement without fire.
Standstill is uncharacteristic of the Western tank and ultimately fatal.
For former Bundeswehr Colonel Wolfgang Schneider, old Soviet tanks can therefore operate on an equal footing with Western tanks given the geographical conditions in Ukraine - they are technically outdated, but due to their lack of weight, they are more agile under the geographical conditions and therefore ultimately more dangerous.
In his opinion, the advantages of Western technology can hardly be brought to bear, especially at the hot spots of the front in the south and southeast with intersected terrain and many towns, rivers and industrial areas, even by the best crew.
So Ukraine is just as well served with its ancient T-55S from Slovenia.
“The battlefield is survival of the fittest at its most merciless.”
“The battlefield is survival of the fittest in its purest and most merciless form,” analyzes Frederik Mertens from the Netherlands.
The military now speaks of a transparent battlefield - a battlefield in which messages in fractions of a second between the sender and receiver complete a situation picture.
Until now, Vladimir Putin's troops in Ukraine were considered to be inflexible and poorly led because they lacked digital communication.
However, more recent studies paint a different picture.
Accordingly, the Russian army has learned something new.
The Ukrainian armed forces initially succeeded “in an unprecedented way” in condensing data from civil and military sources into current situation reports in order to then use them against the invaders from Russia, says Colonel Tim Zahn in the Bundeswehr podcast
Asked
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“Due to the amount of data, significant time savings were achieved, which always play an important role in a military context,” said the head of the Bundeswehr’s Center for Cyber Security.
That's why entire convoys initially came to a standstill;
That's why the Russian artillery fired so little accurately.
That's why Ukraine had the upper hand in the counteroffensive.
The current problem: The Russians have now copied all of this from their opponents.
What this ultimately means is that Russian artillery not only shoots faster, but also more accurately.
Today, Glasen is a battlefield at any time of the day or night and under all weather conditions, says Lieutenant Colonel Martin Winkler, head of the “evaluation” department in the Army Command in the Bundeswehr podcast.
The soldier is also constantly under observation and, in principle, every radio message or heat radiation from a vehicle.
The intelligence officer sees this as a real threat to the Bundeswehr and NATO: “Every day that they wage this war, the Russians gain an advantage over us in terms of actual war experience.” Scientist Miron agrees with this, as she confirmed to
Newsweek
.
“War means a permanent change of learning and adaptation, of innovation and adaptation;
and at a very high speed.
In the next war this cycle will be even faster than in this one.”
Lieutenant Colonel Martin Winkler in the Bundeswehr podcast “Inquired”.
Russia has improved its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities through the use of electronic warfare systems with drones, and Moscow has also increased the precision of its missiles.
For example, the Russians have now been able to read massive amounts of data from the smartphones of captured Ukrainian opponents and condense them into situation reports of the position of even individual guns.
This also made the intelligent Excalibur projectiles of Western howitzers vulnerable to jamming and ultimately limited in their effectiveness.
For the Bundeswehr, this means another clear paradigm shift, as Lieutenant Colonel Winkler explains.
If Russia has the means to gain reconnaissance sovereignty in the sky using drones, as it does now in Ukraine, then the Bundeswehr will have to transform itself back into an original defense army like in the Cold War.
Camouflage and deception would once again be considered general virtues.
On the contrary, in the past Bundeswehr missions in Afghanistan or Mali, the Bundeswehr tried, as he says, to “openly show presence and stabilize”.
According to him, the war in Ukraine suggests one lesson above all: “War means a permanent change of learning and adaptation, of innovation and adaptation;
and at a very high speed.
In the next war, this cycle will run even faster than in this one.” However, the human factor would remain the decisive difference, both at the command level with the requirements for leadership, and in the squad with the requirements for morale and camaraderie - a realization , which Putin's troops apparently buy with a lot of blood, as the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
believes, and is thus aimed at the carnage around Avdiivka.
Russians have now learned a lot in the field of electronic warfare
“The Russians may have recognized that their ability to conduct large-scale offensive operations is limited.
And they have problems with the professionalism of their soldiers.
The enormous losses show this,” said
Lieutenant General Andreas Marlow, commander of the EU education and training mission for Ukraine, to the
NZZ .
But he sees that they have borrowed much of Ukraine's technical innovation: "We know that the Russians are in the area of electronic warfare and artillery warfare, the use of drones and loitering ammunition" (a weapon , who hang around in the air until the order to deploy is radioed) have become strong.
They learned a lot from fighting with barriers, as shown by the huge belt of mines they laid deep and across Ukraine, which gave the Ukrainians a lot of trouble in their counteroffensive.”
The German general also observes the high death toll in the Russian tank weapon, which could ultimately lead to an enormous boost in Russian development after the end of the war;
which in turn could put NATO under pressure and a steel monster like the British Challenger or the American Abrams could - already foreseeable today - be reduced to scrap iron faster than expected, as Marlow
suspected to the
NZZ .
An analysis of what causes tanks to fail in the first place is urgently needed.
“Is it through direct tank duels, is it through artillery, drones, anti-tank guided missiles, 'loitering ammunition', ambushes by tank destruction squads or through mines?
This raises the question of what protection technologies need to be developed to counter these threats.
We are seeing the Russians learn and adapt their protective technologies and tactics.
In any case, the mass of the tanks is not caused by direct fire, but by drones, loitering ammunition and mines.
Newsman Winkler is confronted with huge amounts of data and years of analysis when dealing with the war in Ukraine;
and fears the need for a quantum leap in German thinking.
“We need a mindset as innovators.
For the land forces, this is the central lesson from Ukraine: the next war will also be fought on land.” For a technical masterpiece from the West like the Challenger, it is a real challenge and an existential question of future viability: it was defeated by a simple puddle.