analysts concluded shortly after World War II had been very cost-effective as anti-armor weapons, accounting for as much as 20 percent of all tanks damaged by enemy action. The defense added the mass employment of anti-tank and anti-personnel land mines to its bag of tricks, which U.S. Assuming a reasonable air defense, the lateral movement of armor behind one’s own lines is vastly easier than the offense’s forward movement of armor against a defended position. The mobility of armored forces allows the defender to rapidly move reserves to whatever segments of its defense seem in greatest danger of collapse. The perfection of the tank, fighter aircraft, and radio allowed skilled attackers to overcome defenses early in World War II, but over time, defenders found ways to employ the same assets. They were assisted in this effort by vast improvements in firepower, including range, rate, accuracy, and lethality, which augmented the typical advantage that defenders have: the ability to choose the terrain on which they will fight, to construct fortifications, and to arrange their forces in ways that allow the most effective use of firepower-for example, by ambushing. The breakthrough problem emerged during the First World War, when European countries first became rich and populous enough to defend very long fronts-in some cases nearly their entire borders. But military history suggests the challenges here are also more daunting than have been commonly understood-at least among the public in the West. Ukraine naturally wishes to avoid the attritional war by succeeding at its breakthrough campaign. To fail at this kind of campaign will mean that Ukraine is likely destined for a long war of attrition-an inauspicious one, pitting it against a much more populous country.
To achieve this goal through military action, the Ukrainian military must accomplish one of the most daunting of military tasks: It must break through dense, well-prepared defensive positions, find some running room, and then either move quickly toward an important geographic objective such as the Sea of Azov, hoping to unravel the remains of the defending Russian army along the way, or quickly attempt to encircle a portion of Russia’s sizable forces in hopes of annihilating them. It is the stated policy of the Ukrainian government to retake all of the territory that Russia has seized since 2014, including Crimea.
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