COLOMBIA-ICC-POLITICS-DIPLOMACY-KHAN

Contributor

Congressional Lawmakers Continue Work On Capitol Hill

Staff

Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump hosts a campaign event in Freeland

The Washington Post

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-PALU

Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito And Elena Kagan Testify Before The House Appropriations Committee

Supreme Court Alito Flag

President Donald J. Trump

staff

The family of Hersh Goldberg-Polin appears on a screen via video link during a news conference in Tel Aviv

Former US president Trump's hush money criminal trial continues in New York City, USA - 13 May 2024

Trump

US-POLITICS-JUSTICE-COURT-TRUMP

For The Washington Post

(Chris Gash for The Washington Post)

APTOPIX Israel Holocaust Remembrance

op-allen-democracypromo

Stormy Daniels

UGCR

RUSSIA-US-DIPLOMACY-BASKET-COURT

(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-LAMOTT

Sonia Sotomayor,Clarence Thomas,John Roberts,Samuel Alito,Elena Kagan,Amy Coney Barrett,Neil Gorsuch,Brett Kavanaugh,Ketanji Brown Jackson,Michael Dreeben

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show expanded byline information on articles

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

I was homeless as a kid. Here’s how I survived. 

Kittens or puppies? Animals left at shelter turned out to be foxes — again.

A teen dropped out of high school during WWII. Now 99, she just graduated.

The United States used to have cachet in China. Not anymore.

Loggers encroach on an uncontacted tribe, and the government shrugs

U.N. chief ‘trusts’ Israel will comply with ICJ order to halt Rafah assault

Miss Manners: How do I know if something is a gift?

Ask Amy: I don’t think my son’s girlfriend is right for him

Carolyn Hax: If you’re happy alone, then why would you want a relationship?

Progressive Democrats aren’t turning activism into election wins

More voters are identifying as Republicans. That could bode ill for Democrats in November.

U.S. and allies move to tap frozen Russian funds despite Kremlin threats

In Milwaukee public housing, a padlocked patio becomes a battleground

‘America is a nation of Charlies’ | Opinion

The strengths and weaknesses of the case against Trump

A year after paying off our 2.75% mortgage, we still have no regrets

Home-insurance payouts are shrinking. Here’s how to prevent the worst.

Maxed out on your credit card? Here’s how to dig out.

Want to find hidden gem restaurants? Follow the business crowd to lunch. 

American Airlines fires lawyers after blaming child for being filmed in bathroom

Budget airlines are dropping notorious fees. What changed?

Here’s who The Post endorses in D.C. Council primary elections

How (not) to fix the border

The Trump hush money trial shows how far the GOP has fallen

Nationals loosen up and ride MacKenzie Gore to a win over the Mariners

The Nats’ offense is floundering. There are a few reasons.

At STK Steakhouse, the ‘vibe’ is loud, expensive and largely tasteless 

Why Google’s AI might recommend you mix glue into your pizza

Boeing continues to struggle with spacecraft problems ahead of human flight

Kabosu, side-eyeing Shiba inu who inspired the ‘doge’ meme, dies at 18

Stringer

As top Russian and Ukrainian generals assess the battlefield after nearly two brutal years of stalemated “positional” warfare, they draw the same lessons: Tanks, manned aircraft and traditional maneuver forces are sitting ducks, while advanced drones and digital battle-management systems can have a decisive impact.

Russia has come to realize <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/19/palantir-algorithm-data-ukraine-war/" target=_blank>what Ukraine recognized</a> more than a year ago: This is an “algorithm war,” one where digital intelligence and targeting systems have rewritten the rules of conflict. The “fog of war” experienced by commanders for centuries has cleared. In the newly transparent battlespace, movements by large units are instantly visible and vulnerable.

This look into Russian and Ukrainian military assessments is possible thanks to commentaries published in the past two weeks by two veteran commanders, Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, a former chief of the Russian general staff, and Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, head of the Ukrainian military. They appeared, respectively, in <a href="https://www.armystandard.ru/news/2024129114-TnO1s.html" target=_blank>Army Standard</a>, a Russian publication, and on the website of <a href="https://www.zsu.gov.ua/2024/02/stattya-golovnokomaduvacha-zs-ukrayiny-generala-valeriya-zaluzhnogo-shhodo-suchasnogo-dyzajnu-vijskovyh-operaczij-u-rosijsko-ukrayinskij-vijni-v-borotbi-za-inicziatyvu/" target=_blank>the Ukrainian defense ministry</a>.

The commentaries were flagged to me by Kevin Ryan, a retired Army brigadier general who served as U.S. defense attaché in Moscow and then taught at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. He translated the articles and circulated them this week among Russia specialists. Zaluzhny made similar comments about the importance of drones in an interview published in November in <a href="https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/11/01/the-commander-in-chief-of-ukraines-armed-forces-on-how-to-win-the-war" target=_blank>the Economist</a>, but the Russian analysis is new and startling.

“These two adversaries see many of the same lessons,” Ryan writes in an email summarizing the commentaries. The generals recognize that in the Ukraine battlespace, “no concentration of troops, large or small, can escape the ever-present reconnaissance by unmanned aerial systems and satellites,” he notes.

The tactical revolution underway in Ukraine underlines why a congressional failure to approve continued U.S. military support for Kyiv would be so devastating. As Russia gains increasing mastery of digital warfare, Zaluzhny worries that Ukraine is hobbled by “exhaustion of our partners’ stocks of missiles and ammunition” and “the difficulty of our allies in determining the priorities of support.”

Baluyevsky’s comments read like a wake-up call to his fellow Russian officers. He argues that the so-called special military operation in Ukraine has been “an unprecedented test of literally all components of military affairs and military construction.” His analysis came in the foreword for an anthology of essays about the war, which was then summarized in Army Standard by Russian journalist Sergey Valchenko.

Baluyevsky echoes many Western commentators who have argued that defense has trumped offense in Ukraine. “Air defense has won an unexpected triumph over military aviation,” which has “lost the ability to operate en masse over enemy territory” and even must fly “with caution over its own territory.”

The tank “has become one of the main casualties of the combat experience of the last two years,” he explains, since it was “an easily detected and easily hit target” and “turned out to be very vulnerable to mines.” Similarly, “the impossibility of concentrating troops … forces us to conduct combat operations with small units and separate combat vehicles.”

Baluyevsky has some scathing comments about the performance of Russian weapons. “The qualitative superiority of NATO artillery is evident,” he contends. Ukraine “has revealed a significant lag in Russian artillery and missile systems and requires their priority radical rearmament in the next few years.”

The winners in this war are drones. “Unmanned aircraft have rapidly and unconditionally conquered the airspace,” Baluyevsky argues. Zaluzhny agrees that “unmanned systems, along with other new types of weapons, are almost the only tool for getting out of” the stalemate of trench warfare.

Zaluzhny bemoans Russia’s manpower advantage and Ukraine’s “inability … to improve the state of staffing of the Defense Forces without the use of unpopular measures,” such as a nationwide draft. His disagreement with President Volodymyr Zelensky about the need for such an all-out mobilization is one reason for recent tension between the two men — and Zelensky’s reported readiness to sack his commander.

Ukraine, as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/05/ukraine-kyiv-russia-war-united-states-support/" target=_blank>I wrote after visiting Kyiv in October</a>, is exhausted by war and slowly bleeding out. Zaluzhny implicitly recognizes this war fatigue in arguing for increased use of unmanned systems to “reduce the level of losses … reduce the degree of participation of traditional means of destruction … [and] limited involvement of heavy equipment.”

The lesson for the United States, beyond the simple but urgent need to continue military assistance for Ukraine, is to focus that support on the high-tech weapons that matter. The weapons that have generated endless debate, such as tanks and F-16 fighters, are less important than drones, antiaircraft systems and electronic-warfare jammers.

The best weapons today, agree the Russian and Ukrainian generals, might be small, cheap systems such as “first-person view,” or FPV drones that fly into targets like tiny suicide bombers and can be almost impossible to stop. The chilling fact is that these silent killers can be bought and used by almost any combatant, anywhere on Earth. It is, as the generals agree, a new day in warfare.

2018 Finalist team, Pulitzer Prize for Public Service

2018 George Polk Award

2010 Urbino International Press Award

2013 Overseas Press Club Award for Foreign Affairs Commentary

Lifetime Achievement Award, International Committee for Foreign Journalists

Legion D'Honneur awarded by the French government

2004 Edward Weintal Prize

2000 Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary

As The Post’s foreign editor, Ignatius supervised the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

The Paladin

The Quantum Spy

The Director

Bloodmoney

The Increment

Body of Lies

The Sun King

A Firing Offense

The Bank of Fear

SIRO

Agents of Innocence

Harvard College

Kings College, Cambridge

David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. His latest novel is “The Paladin.” 

David Ignatius

washpost

What a Russian and Ukrainian general agree on: This war is different

the-washington-post

Ukrainian servicemen fly with a Vampire UAV near a front line in Zaporizhzhia region

Reuters

Editorials

Columns

Guest opinions

Cartoons

Submit a guest opinion

Today's Opinions newsletter

Opinions

Sign up for Democracy, Refreshed, a newsletter series on how to renovate the republic.

Opinion Columns

Opinion Columnists

Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for opinions on the biggest questions in politics

Washington Post Opinions

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by Jonathan Capehart.