Organizing for Victory: Force Structure in Modern Warfare
Russia invaded Ukraine with Combined Arms Armies, but soon found itself fighting brigade-sized battles. During Ukraine’s offensive the following year, battalion attacks rapidly broke down into company and platoon actions. Towards the end of 2024, Russia’s gains around Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar were executed not at the platoon or even squad level, but by fireteam assaults.
This atomization of combat power is not quite the same as attrition, with which it often gets conflated. It is instead incrementalism. By biting off one trench, one treeline at a time, a series of small-scale attacks can eventually accomplish more than the sum of their individual effects: cut lines of communication, dislocate defensive positions, and force costly withdrawals. Even at the speed of molasses, maneuver is maneuver.
At the same time, incrementalism is not entirely unrelated to attrition. Low-level actions cannot exploit that critical element—time—that separates attrition from more decisive action. They allow defenders to reinforce threatened sectors and conduct more orderly withdrawals, making these encirclements proportionally costlier for the attacker than a clean breakthrough. The less actions are coordinated across time, space, and echelon, the more attrition dominates.
Staffwork and Support
Strategy is conceived top-down, but executed bottom-up. If even a company cannot accomplish specific time-dependent objectives, then a brigade certainly can’t either. As much as higher commanders might like to orchestrate more complex operations, a thousand sources of friction conspire to disrupt the best-laid plans. Surveillance makes it harder to attain surprise, long-range fires make it hard to concentrate for the attack, and the slow speed of advance allows the defender to reinforce threatened sectors before any breakthrough can be achieved.
Overcoming this hurdle is both a material and an organizational problem. So much equipment is required to perform even the most basic assault: extensive surveillance, large volumes of fires, EW against enemy sensors, counter-UAS, anti-air, obstacle clearance, UAVs of all sizes, etc. When there is demand for such a variety of equipment and materiel, there will always be shortages at some critical point. Then there is the problem of employment: all this must be staged in advance and integrated at all echelons, which much execute their missions at tempo. In the specific case of the Ukraine War, well-placed commentators have noted that both sides lacked sufficiently trained staffs to orchestrate complex operations from the very beginning.
But even supposing that these gaps could be filled, how well could either side generate complex, large-scale, and high-tempo offensives? No military in the world is currently structured around the sheer number of enabling assets involved in modern warfare, which demand a much higher ratio of support to combat units. It is typically not until the divisional level that the overall tooth-to-tail ratio inverts in favor of the latter, but that likely becomes substantially lower as militaries accommodate new realities. I have argued that we could see such a restructuring at the brigade/regimental level, with an additional level of command to direct each battalion and its enablers. This may apply more generally: each formation consisting of a single maneuver unit and several more fires and enabler units. That would entail changes not just in staff composition, but in staff processes.
(Counterintuitively, this may also increase decentralization on the battlefield. Persistent surveillance and information fusion allow commanders to micromanage their subordinates in ways that are potentially more effective than when control is decentralized. But as the demand for staffwork increases, this becomes a simple bandwidth issue: higher staffs cannot manage the number of decisions coming in, no matter how much information they have regarding subordinates’ positions. This means that some levels of command will be far more centralized than others. As things look now, the battalion is probably well suited to exercise close control over its companies, but brigades/regiments must give their battalions looser rein. As new enabling technologies are introduced, so too will the loci of centralized control.)
Force Structure and Technology
In modern conflicts, there are always painful learning periods as militaries adjust to the realities imposed by new technology. Victory is ultimately determined less by the hardware and software itself than by which side can employ it better. This makes force structure all the more important: although a country can often buy or produce new weaponry in the middle of a war, it is much harder to change how it fights mid-course. Although this too is inevitably a bumpy process, the rewards for the side that manages it better are all the greater.
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