The main feature of the Ukrainian conflict is its essence of "war of attrition". In other words, the kinetic phases end in clashes of materials, which recall Jünger's "organised waste", where the achievement of the objectives is not determined by the conquest of the territory, but by the destruction, as rapidly as possible, of the military resources of the enemy.
In this type of war, where one of the determinants is also the economic-industrial capacity of a country, the purely tactical and "major tactical" factor is only one of the elements that make up the intricate strategic picture.
Suffice it to say that, at the end of the victorious Ukrainian offensive in the summer of 2022, there were no longer any significant changes in the geography of the front; an event plastically represented by the construction of the "Surovikin Line" by the Russian side, which also represented the predominant factor in the failure of the great Ukrainian summer-autumn offensive of 2023.
Even at this stage, with the Russians on the attack and the Ukrainian Armed Forces close to a crisis in their defensive mechanism, it appears probable that, to quote General Carlo Jean, "the maneuver fails and we return to a war of attrition", also given the possibility that the AFU have to hit the enemy logistics chain thanks to the new weapons sent by the United States.
Su Foreign Affairs, Keith L. Carter, Jennifer Spindel and Matthew McClary wrote an article emblematically titled "How Ukraine Can Do More With Less" in which it is proposed that the Ukrainians give up fighting Russia on the level of conventional war, adopting, instead, guerrilla warfare and asymmetric strategy as a tool to win.
However, opting for guerrilla warfare is equivalent to giving up the defense of the territory. If militarily this would allow us to preserve a greater number of men and weapons, politically it would be suicide for Kiev. The Ukrainian capacity for resistance depends on the "political coefficient" of credibility that it can express with Western allies, who - indeed skeptically - in order to supply weapons and weapons systems to the Ukrainians ask that they defend their territory. The two elements are rigidly connected and, in some ways, feed themselves cyclically. One more reason to say that guerrilla warfare is not a viable path for Ukraine.
The responses that guerrilla warfare could give in this sense are far too limited compared to those of conventional warfare. The transition to guerrilla warfare would also imply a difficult work of transformation and revision of the personnel, tactics and even operational strategy and "goals of the war" for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The examples given by the authors to support their thesis, such as the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and the French resistance of the years 1940-1944 do not stand up to the test of facts: too different realities, where the results of guerrilla warfare were obtained by causes not comparable to the Ukrainian scenario.
We read in the article that "Ukraine should embrace a different concept of victory, based on staying in the fight and resisting Russian aggression". This is waiting for the Russians to be exhausted by the resistance and for the AFU to launch a victorious offensive.
But Ukrainian political-strategic objectives, which can be summarized as obtaining serious security guarantees, participating in the Western blocs of NATO and the EU and preserving an outlet to the sea, can be achieved by Kiev just continuing to fight like he is doing now.
And if it is true that Ukraine cannot, for obvious reasons, afford an "unlimited concentration of power" against Russia, it can nevertheless conceive, on the basis of NATO doctrine, models of forces, armaments and strategies that allow it to economize on number of casualties among its soldiers. From this also derives the priority given to fire, preferably stand off, with respect to the clash of the masses as instead conceived and implemented by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
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