Russia’s War in Ukraine: Emerging Insights for UK and NATO Joint Doctrine

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What is the issue?

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, numerous commentaries, articles and social media posts have been published, offering insights about the ongoing conflict and its supposed implications for the changing character of warfare. As much of this open-source analysis has focused on the technical and tactical levels, comparatively few analysts have provided observations about what the fighting means for the future of joint doctrine at the operational and strategic levels. Identifying and learning these lessons is a priority for NATO militaries.

How did we help?

To determine whether this outpouring of commentary and analysis may contain useful lessons for further consideration, the Doctrine team within the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) of the UK Ministry of Defence (which has subsequently become part of the new Integrated Warfare Centre [IWC]) commissioned a review of relevant open-source literature to identify potential useful lessons and implications for UK and NATO joint doctrine.

RAND Europe conducted the research as lead of the Global Strategic Partnership, a consortium of organisations providing rolling strategic analysis and academic support to the IWC and Defence Futures, formerly known as DCDC.

What did we find?

The review of open-source literature suggests recurring themes relating to:

The uncertain direction and outcome of the war highlighted by Ukraine’s and Russia’s warfighting compared to that of NATO.
The simultaneous use of state-of-the-art and 20th-century tactics and technologies on the battlefield, challenging simplistic ideas of military-technological revolution.
The need to maintain continuous learning and adaptation to support competitiveness.
The importance of endurance understood both in terms of industrial capacity and societal will-to-fight in a wider context of increased costs (i.e. human, economic, equipment).
The leveraging of whole-of-society approaching by the warring parties including allies and partners to support warfighting capacity.

Beyond this, the literature review also highlighted debates around the following topics:

Whether, how and why NATO failed to deter the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the run up to February 2022.
How to explain Russia’s military underperformance, especially during the first year of its invasion.
How increased dispersal of forces will shape the future of warfare in a more transparent battlespace (positional versus attritional versus manoeuvre approaches).
Whether technological developments or activities in newer domains (e.g., space, cyber and electromagnetic) should be considered evolutionary or revolutionary in terms of their impacts on operational and strategic outcomes.
Whether legacy technologies such as tanks or helicopters will continue to play an impactful role in future conflicts given changes in the threat environment.
What the trajectory or outcomes of Ukrainian and Russian operations over the coming months and years will be.

What can be done?

The objective of the literature review was to identify potential implications for joint doctrine at the operational and strategic levels. Based on the study team’s findings, the following elements for further consideration were identified:

While tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) and tactical doctrine will need to continue to evolve, the war in Ukraine does not provide compelling evidence of any need for fundamental changes in NATO or the UK’s operational-level joint doctrine (e.g., key concepts such as the manoeuvrist approach, comprehensive approach or mission command).
Instead, the published literature on Ukraine suggests that the most pressing question is not whether NATO and the UK’s joint doctrine is appropriate, but rather whether sufficient resources are available to credibly implement those ideas and principles as envisaged, especially over the course of a long war.
Urgent action is needed to address a lack of sufficient mass of personnel, equipment or stockpiles, especially munitions. Shortfalls are also reported in readiness, training and infrastructure and in levels of industrial mobilisation and societal resilience more widely.
Relatedly, there is an urgent need to boost Defence’s capacity for learning and adaptation. This includes having efficient lessons, warfare development and doctrine functions, and the processes and culture to translate the latest ideas into behavioural change across Defence.