Plan To Fail

What the war in Ukraine teaches us about NATO doctrine and why it should (but won’t) change immediately

The war that continues to cast a long shadow. Image credit: Britannica

There are lots of sayings in the military that encapsulate in a few words a great deal of wisdom learned the hard way. Failure to plan is planning to fail. Two is one, one is none. Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted. Prior preparation and planning prevent piss-poor performance.

And so on.

Such encapsulations tend to focus on infantry-level activities and have significant practical value. Unfortunately, there’s no real equivalent when we move up the ladder from TTPs to general doctrine. And so there’s no easy way to encapsulate some of the crucial lessons the Russian invasion and subsequent occupation of Ukraine should be teaching us. This article, therefore, will cover in modest detail some of what I believe are key weaknesses in current NATO doctrine — weaknesses that leave NATO forces completely vulnerable to supposedly inferior Russian capabilities.

Many of these lessons are germane at the troop or patrol level; others require a complete rethink of national defense posture. So let’s begin with the easiest lessons: those that apply at the very sharp end of combat down on the ground with the “grunts.”

To start with the simplest lessons of all, we’re right back to cover and concealment. With drones now all-pervasive on the battlefield and with some of those drones variously having IR and thermal capabilities, all too often there’s nowhere to hide. Until directed energy weapons (DEWs) can be manufactured and fielded in substantial quantities, the ubiquity of drones means ground forces are generally visible to the enemy. Which in turn makes NATO-style maneuver warfare impossible. You can’t mass ground forces without a spotter drone seeing them and artillery destroying them moments later. So the very core of NATO ground doctrine has just gone up in smoke. It’s a sign of how little capacity the West has to respond to reality that no NATO army is presently incorporating significant numbers of drones into red/blue wargames. Putting ten drones into the air is in no way useful when in real life there would be thousands up there. So NATO troops continue to practice tactics that will result in their mass slaughter on the…