Strategy&Future

In February this year, war broke out in the east. Russia attacked Ukraine. A certain stage in the history of our region and in the history of the world has come to an end. For years, here at Strategy&Future, we have been talking and writing about the need to prepare for the new times, to prepare for the reform of the Polish military. These new times have come.

Almost exactly sixty years ago, in October 1962, the Cuban crisis took place. Speaking on Thursday 6th October, at a meeting with donors supporting the Democratic party’s campaign for the Congressional by-elections, President Biden stated that “For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat to the use of nuclear weapons, if in fact things continue down the path they’d been going.” It is worth noting that Biden was referring not to situations where a nuclear weapon could be used in the course of an unintentional escalation (i.e., for example, during the Able Archer ’83 exercise), but as a result of structural factors.

After the debacle in Kharkiv, the Russian Army forced the Russian leadership to search for the proper answer to the new military challenges. It seems the panacea has been found in mobilisation. Officially it has been called partial mobilisation, but all the evidence points us to believe that it is overwhelming and large in scale. Russia is accumulating more manpower than was officially announced. It looks like Moscow is preparing a considerable force to create full domination on the frontline.

Jacek Bartosiak talks to Nicholas Myers on the Russian military mobilisation.

Jacek Bartosiak talks to Paul Scharre (Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security, the award-winning author of “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War”) about AI on the future battlefield.

Sometimes offensive actions and the manoeuvre of heavy units are necessary, but they must be well thought out and planned, because this is completely different from defensive actions, especially on the modern battlefield, where there are many sensors and the enemy’s movement is quickly detected, and on top of this there are various ways of destroying concentrated forces at the front.

On the fields of Ukraine, the twentieth-century method of conducting land war (centred on attack, tank columns, a fairly shallow front, and always incomplete reconnaissance, where the fog of war still reigns) is dying out. After the inevitable winter break, a new way will appear — one from the 21st century. It will be a way of waging a more positional war, where it is difficult to make a decisive offensive manoeuvre, where a modern reconnaissance battle reigns along with the related information dominance, possible thanks to the widespread use of sensors, including cheap drones. Where a manoeuvre of masses of tanks over a long distance will be costly for both sides, and the ubiquitous sensors and precision fire will make it possible to strike deeply into the enemy group and its base. Where there will be plenty of artillery and rocket duels and raids and subversive actions through the obviously porous front lines. That is unless Germany and France, “concerned” with their citizens’ standard of living in the face of the energy and food war that Russia is waging, force Ukraine in the winter to accept a Russian victory and Russian political conditions that will dominate our part of Europe.

The Russian political and military leadership is facing a dilemma in Ukraine. On the one hand they are feeling that the Russian Army is exhausting its power, hence the need for a peace agreement or at least an armistice.

When Putin stated in July that Moscow had barely started its campaign in Ukraine, daring the west to try to defeat it on the battlefield, it was considered a sign of Russia’s readiness to continue its military campaign in Ukraine and its grand strategy concentrated on the bigger geopolitical game than Eastern Europe.

How would the situation in Europe and in the world have developed if Kyiv had been captured by the Russians in the first days of the war? I am of the opinion that despite all the risks associated with posing such counterfactual questions, it is worth asking them. Firstly, because I have the impression that in Poland we are not fully aware of how close we were to a catastrophe in the first days of the war in Ukraine. Secondly, because the war in Ukraine continues, its end result is by no means known and the dangers that Poland would face in the event of a quick victory for Russia in February are still hanging over us.

Jacek Bartosiak talks to Nicholas Gvosdev (a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, editor of “Orbis” at Foreign Policy Research Institute and co-host of the “Doorstep” podcast at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs) on Russia and the future of Eurasia.

To understand the current course of the war in Ukraine, we must go to the Marxist theory of war, which serves as the foundation for Russian military doctrine. The Marxist school of the war teaches that war is a continuation of politics, a premise taken from Clausewitz.