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Atlantic: When We Ignore Its Attrition Ukraine Wins
In The Atlantic two military historians are claiming that:
Russia Is Losing the War of Attrition
Wars are rarely won so decisively, because attrition is not only a condition of war, but a strategic choice. Smaller powers can, through the intelligent application of attrition, succeed in advancing their own goals.
Hmm …
Attrition warfare …:
… is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel, materiel and morale.
There are two (or more) sides in a war of attrition. To see which side is winning one has to estimate each sides capabilities and losses. The side which is the first to run out of the necessary resources will lose the competition.
A piece that claims that this or that side will be losing due to attrition should therefore provide numbers for each side of the conflict and compare them to support the claim.
The authors of the Atlantic piece fail to do so.
They mention the state of Russia's economy, the Russian loss of armored vehicle, and Russian manpower shortages – which, they claim, are all bad. But they, at no point, write about the state of the Ukrainian economy, its losses and dire manpower shortage.
The sources they quote are dubious to laughable:
Russian casualties have mounted steadily. According to the British Ministry of Defence, in December 2022, they stood at roughly 500 a day; in December 2023, at just under 1,000; and in December 2024, at more than 1,500. In 2024 alone, Russia suffered nearly 430,000 killed and wounded, compared with just over 250,000 in 2023.
That is indeed what the British Defense Intelligence claims. But does that make sense? Russian losses during the bloody Battle of Bakhmut in late 2022 early 2023 are given as 500-600 per day. Current losses, with a rather quiet frontline and no ongoing big battle, are claimed to be triple of those. That's simply not plausible. Other western sources are giving much lower Russian casualty numbers.
Ukrainian losses are, by the way, not mentioned at all.
The authors then switch. From pointing to Russian losses while ignoring Ukrainian ones they now point to Ukrainian success in production:
In 2024, the Ukrainian military received over 1.2 million different Ukrainian-produced UAVs—two orders of magnitude more than Ukraine possessed, let alone produced, at the beginning of the war. Ukrainian production rates are still rising; it aims to produce 4 million drones this year alone.
The authors of course fail to mention that Russia is producing even more than those.
The following paragraph has another cute trick the author try to play on their readers:
UAVs are crucial because they have replaced artillery as the most effective system on the field of battle. By one estimate, UAVs now cause 70 percent of Russian losses. Ukraine’s robust defense industry is innovating more quickly and effectively than that of Russia and its allies.
Cause "70% of Russia losses" speaks for the authors thesis but only until you click through to the source where you find that the number applies to both sides:
Drones, not the big, heavy artillery that the war was once known for, inflict about 70 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties, said Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s Parliament. In some battles, they cause even more — up to 80 percent of deaths and injuries, commanders say.
[Sidenote: I for one doubt that number for both sides. We do see a lot of videos of FPV drone casualties but that is only so because every drone has a camera. Artillery, which is historically causing 70-80% of all battlefield casualties, has not stopped firing and has not lost its effect. Each side is firing some 10,000+ artillery rounds per day. That sums up to more than 7 million rounds per year. A million drones, of which many fail, add to the damage artillery causes but do not replace it. Drones are, like all other weapons, part of the game but not game changers.]
Back to the Atlantic claim that Russia is losing the war of attrition.
The authors mention alleged Russian problems on some issues and Ukrainian successes on other issue. But the have failed to make even one comparison of losses, or successes, on both sides. Their conclusion ..:
Ukraine is not on the verge of collapse, and it is Russia, not Ukraine, that is losing the attritional war, …
.. is not supported by any evidence.
It is a sad state when the weapon industry can not come up with better propaganda than this.
Excellent post on the tricks pulled by the authors.
Can’t help pointing out another: The authors don’t clearly define what either attritional campaign or an attritional strategy are, much less cite the difference in the historical precedents cited. It cites two examples of an attritional campaign, the Luftwaffe and U-boats. The Luftwaffe’s attritional campaign at Dunkirk certainly succeeded in trapping the equipment. If viewed as intended to capture the British army, it certainly failed. But that was not because “a technologically advanced, tactically and operationally sophisticated approach that rendered those organizations, large as they were, unable to function effectively.” The soldiers’ escape from Dunkirk was no such thing. Radar and such certainly played a role in minimizing the effects of the Blitz long-term…but it is by no means clear the Luftwaffe was Ii>ever in a good position to make a difference. The way it might have was, as the authors probably know, would have been to take air supremacy to cover for a seaborne invasion of the island of Britain. But invasion is not an attritional strategy! As arguments for the viability of Ukrainian attrition, this is weak.
There is no good precedent for strategic bombing to play a decisive role in any victory in war. Given that Britain was an island dependent on food imports (for one) the U-boat strategy probably seemed more promising. But of course, the effectiveness depended on the willingness of the population to suffer hunger, even as the most weakened died of disease, physical exhaustion or even outright starvation. It didn’t happen, so no one can say either that the English would have surrendered rather than to die like the people of Leningrad. Again, this is a weak argument for Ukraine’s attritional strategy.
Now these two examples are I think obvious examples that attritional warfare as the singular strategy doesn’t work. The insinuation that Ukraine’s attritional warfare could work against Russia should be puzzling. Attrition as the strategy of final victory has a couple of well-known examples, the American Revolution for one. The key to the importance of attritional warfare I think is that the attritional side avoids decisive defeat, while biding its time for special opportunities to hand key defeats to an enemy who is engaged in a war of choice. The English had two armies trapped and taken, they gave up despite many tactical victories. Defeat of armies is still part of an attritional strategy. Ukraine’s attritional strategy by implication needs to defeat at least one Russian army, a conclusion the authors pointedly avoid. Another thing is, given that Donbass is only doubtfully Ukrainian in the fascist sense, where Russian-language speakers and ethnic Russians are at best second-class citizens, it is not even clear that Russia isn’t already defending part of its home. The right of nations to self-determination includes the right to national unity, a right favoring Russia as against Ukraine. Fascist Ukraine is waging a war of conquest.
Another famous example is the Vietnam War. Again, in practice a key turning point in the war as the famous Tet offensive. Apologists for the US claim this was a catastrophic defeat for the defenders of Vietnam (no, they weren’t the US and its clients!) But war and politics are inseparable and the blow to the premises of the US invasion was literally incalculable. It put paid to the many American boasts that the US was winning. Such assaults are not attritional warfare at all. That’s why Ukraine, despite the authors’ neglect of the fact, launched the Kursk offensive in defiance of the narrow precepts of attrition.
The authors also cite the Allied war against Germany in WWI as attritional warfare. Quite aside from the fact that there were many reasons why neither side could do anything else, they certainly spent hundreds of thousands of lives in pursuit of traditional battlefield victories. Even more to the point, the eventual German surrender had a great deal to do with events at the home front, with the rising tide of revolution. Revolution preceded the surrender. The infamous claim of later German militarists and fascists about a “Stab in the back” from domestic socialists was not devoid of any contact with reality. In my view, there was a stab in the back: The German army betrayed its own war, to march to the rear and stab its domestic enemies, the revolution, in the back!
None of this strongly supports their contention that Ukraine’s attritional strategy against Russia can even win, any more than a purely attritional Russian strategy can win. The cheats our host exposes so effectively in his post are needed only to claim its Ukraine’s attritional strategy that can win. The question they avoid, is their goal a Ukrainian victory, or merely attrition against Russia in the war against Russia? In that war, Ukraine is only a single front and its people disposable. I think that is the case. It is an ugly and cynical cause, which is why they are so duplicitous. Others may disagree.
This is not short. No doubt a good writer could have said it more concisely. But given I’m not a good writer, it is still to the point.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Mar 8 2025 20:35 utc | 38
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