WAR-REPORT : The war in Ukraine offers many important lessons for the defense of Taiwan against possible aggression by the People’s Republic of China.
The obvious differences between the theaters and the combatants must not be allowed to obscure the important changes in the character of war manifested in Ukraine that will likely apply to almost all future major conflicts.
Some lessons will apply directly, since a successful amphibious invasion ends in ground combat. Others require abstraction and major adaptation. But the PRC is studying the war and drawing its own conclusions about how to prepare for future conflict in the western Pacific, and it behooves the United States, Taiwan, and our allies and partners to do the same.
The Ukraine war is demonstrating dramatic changes in the character of war in five main ways:
1) The effectiveness of integrated air/missile defense (IAMD) against even intensive and complex air/missile attack (a phenomenon also visible in Iranian attacks against Israel);
2) The ability of enormous masses of tactical drones—millions of drones used on both sides—to create partially transparent battlefields and constrain combat to positional forms;
3) The ability of integrated drone-missile attacks including both aerial and maritime drones to achieve mission kills and even catastrophic kills of major and minor surface combatants;
4) The expansion of electronic warfare (EW) capabilities to scales and effects never before seen in combat; and
5) The emergence of an extremely rapid battlefield technological-tactical innovation cycle, driven largely by a race between drone and EW technologies, that can see major changes implement along a thousand-kilometer frontline in as few as two-three weeks.
