Conflict in Focus: Insights for Future Conflicts from the Russia-Ukraine War

 This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on May 9, 2025. Watch the full video here.

John J. Hamre: Good morning, everybody. We’ve got a few people streaming in and I want to make sure they have a chance to get a seat. Thank you all. Thank you all for coming. On a Friday morning. You know, this isn’t the best time to do conferences in Washington, D.C., but it is great to see all of you here. And I am really very pleased you’re here. And, of course, we’re going to have a – have lots of people that are watching virtually, and then we’re recording and streaming too. So my name is John Hamre. I’m president here at CSIS. And I have to apologize. I had some oral surgery this morning. This side of my mouth is – (makes noise). I had a real good – (makes noise) – you know? So forgive me if I – if I sound blurbely. But I really did want to say a few things before we get started.

And this was – let me first say, this was something we’d never done before. We’d never asked our military fellows – because we’ve always kind of given them – you guys decide what’s going to enrich your experience while you’re with us. And we always left it to them. This is the first time we asked them to collaborate on a joint project, and one that’s kind of from front to end. They had to design this. They had to think about the content of it. They had to think about how was the best way to communicate this message. And it’s really – we put them into the depth – thrown them off the deep end of the pool. You know, we got to figure this out.

You know, but this is what it means to be in public policy, is how do we communicate really important things to an audience that doesn’t necessarily understand. They’re curious. But you have to convince them about some of your perspective. And we’re going to see that today. I think the work that these fellows have done is really remarkable. And I told them that I think this is going to be required reading, required viewing, you know, in the military academies. I think this war – every war has really important insights and developments. I think this one is huge. I think it’s just transforming the nature of combat going forward.

And it’s not just, you know, gee-whiz drones, you know. It’s far more comprehensive, far bigger than that. And so it’s going to be really an interesting hour and a half that we have with you all. So Seth Jones is going to come up here. He’s going to get us really started. And I look forward to joining you in the audience and listening to this very fine opportunity. Thank you all. Seth. (Applause.)

Seth G. Jones: Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Hamre. You didn’t say this, but I will. This endeavor by our military fellows was actually inspired by you. So I think it was – it was you who came up with the idea of getting our military fellows, who have experience at the operational and tactical level of warfare, and to pull out lessons that are going to be very appropriate and thoughtful about how the character of warfare is evolving. The U.S. has not been directly engaged in the wars in Ukraine – in the war in Ukraine, but has been indirectly involved in providing a range of assistance, intelligence.

And I think one of the things that’s interesting is that there has been some work done on the war in Ukraine, but what you’ll see here, and based on the background of our military fellows, is their comparative advantage in really looking at the lessons at the operational and tactical level, and the application and the implications for warfare at that level.

So what we’re going to do is hand this off to Colonel Scott Pence from the U.S. Army, who’s going to provide an overview and he’s going to tee up the video that you’re going to see, and then we will do a discussion including with audience questions on what they’ve put together, “Lessons from the Russia-Ukraine War.”

Scott, thanks for doing this, and thanks to all the military fellows for doing this. Really looking forward to the discussion. (Applause.)

Colonel Scott Pence: Thank you, Seth.

As you said, I’m Colonel Scott Pence from the U.S. Army, who is a military fellow here, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank, first of all, Dhanesh Mahtani, who helped put all these – from the BRAC Studio who put all this together. His proactive work from the beginning made this possible.

What you’ll see in these highlights are people from experiences. You have Ukrainians. You have military professionals who are retired, some of them active duty and some of them are allied military professionals. You have academics and then you also have people from leaders and nonprofits, and you have people from industry.

We have over 10 hours of material. Now, not many people have 10 hours to spare to watch all of our panels so what we did and what Dhanesh helped us do is distill that down to 20 minutes of only the best of some of the highlights that came out of all these panels. So that’ll help you appreciate some of the things that he helped us put together.

So thank you very much. And without further ado, we’ll watch this highlight reel.

(A video presentation begins.)

Col. Pence: In war, land is decisive. Nowhere is this more important than in the Russia-Ukraine war. Welcome to the Land Domain Panel of our series Conflict in Focus: Lessons from Russia-Ukraine.

We’ll see on 24 February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine along several axes: one from the north from Belarus toward Kyiv; one from the east toward Kharkiv; and one other major axis, from Crimea to Kherson.

Lieutenant General Ben Hodges (Ret): Dr. Jensen said maybe the most important thing we’re going to hear today. He talked about super soldiers. And I do worry there’s so much emphasis on technology and drones and all that that we are losing sight of the fact that, ultimately, it’s about women and men who are properly trained, properly led, and determined to win. And so this is where Ukraine, I think – is why they’ve been able to do what they’ve done despite Russia having all the other advantages.

Colonel Roman Kostenko: However, I want to talk about Kursk. In my opinion, this was an incursion of historic magnitude – not only historic, but also of significant geopolitical importance overall, both from geopolitical and tactical perspectives. This is an example of what I call asymmetric actions. Instead of focusing our forces solely on fighting in the current territories, we redirected them into Russian territory.

Dr. Benjamin Jensen:

 War is always an extension of politics, and politics often imposes a series of limitations upon campaign design – whether it’s restraints or constraints. So that’s the kind of major campaign dilemma that I think most people miss.

Col. Kostenko: (From video.) What I can say about the North Koreans is that they are very good soldiers. They are very well trained. But the way they are trained reflects the methods of warfare from the 1960s and ’70s. They are not as well equipped for modern warfare. What we observe is that the North Koreans typically act on the battlefield by lining up in large formations. They tend to advance in a way that reminds us of the tactics used during the Soviet times, where soldiers were trained to line up and move forward. This makes them very easy targets for modern drones which can easily spot and destroy them. The Russians are aware of this, but for some reason they don’t train the North Koreans to avoid forming those lines or, at least, not to advance in such a predictable way to avoid being targeted by drones. We don’t know why.

Dr. Jensen: I’m not fully convinced that modern lethality is the most physically fit stud muffin killing the other most physically fit stud muffin. I’m not saying we sacrifice training and discipline and physical fitness in our formations. I’m saying that the North Koreans, who are insanely physically fit, are getting killed by people who probably wouldn’t sometimes pass our own army physical fitness test with a drone. So I think it also is a moment to pause and think about what actually generates real battlefield lethality in 2025.

Lt. Gen. Hodges: And, you know, every video I’ve ever seen of drones blowing up tanks or armored vehicles, those vehicles were sitting out in the open where Ray Charles could have found them. (Laughter.) And they appear to be abandoned. So it is definitely the end of poorly trained, poorly employed tanks – absolutely. But I don’t know that we want to learn the lesson of no more tanks. Just as we talked about earlier, what the Ukrainians were able to do, mass large armored formations that made this counteroffensive into Kursk. So let’s make sure we learn the correct lessons.

Dr. Jensen: They’re not as good as advertised, what we grew up to believe. And, two, there’s some disconnect – and it might be institutional, political, cultural – between who controls what we would call operational fires assets, so those longer-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, versus who’s in charge of the ground campaign. And so that means the other lesson now more at the operational level is there is – it’s going to be very costly and bloody to create any type of breakthrough unless you have brilliant deception, like Kursk, or you’re able to create that kind of operational fire synchronized with key maneuver corridors to actually conduct a large-scale offensive.

Captain Quinton Packard: Today we look closely at lessons we can take away from the battle of the Black Sea and discuss how they may inform future conflicts. Welcome to the Maritime Domain Panel of Conflict in Focus: Lessons from Russia-Ukraine.

Rear Admiral Mike Mattis: I think what we’re seeing, actually, is that a nation with no navy has been able to defy a nation with one of the premier navies in the world. The overall erosion of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea Fleet is they’ve lost 40 percent of their fleet due to USV strikes, deep strike, and other activities that have eroded them.

It’s an evolving fight, changing character of war with the drones. But this is not going to be a static fight moving forward. So again, this isn’t something that Ukraine has locked in and it’s going to be permanently good. It is something that if you’re able to stay ahead where the evolution of the fight in the maritime goes, these sea spaces are ripe for sea denial capability.

Stacie Pettyjohn: Uncrewed vessels are a wonderful sea denial capability, especially in constrained waters and in close ranges. And what we haven’t seen yet, and where I think their capability will dilute because you just can’t mass as many forces, is over longer distances.

We need to figure out how we employ them with our really advanced capabilities in the best sort of sequence and way to achieve specific missions. And that’s where I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, and testing and experimentation that needs to happen, and where there could potentially be a revolutionary change, especially as uncrewed systems become more autonomous.

Rebecca Grant: It’s clear that the battle in the Black Sea has enormous implications for our tactics, for our procurement, and for our allies.

And I hope that we start to take some of the lessons from what Russia is trying to do to apply both to how we want to defend against that and then how we want to operate against potential Chinese unmanned vehicles.

So we want to continue that integration, for sure. I like what we’re seeing from the Black Sea because it covers what’s, I think, next is most important for us, which is additional experimentation and seeing how all these things work together.

In the electronic warfare space we see incredible rapid back and forth and changes in software and in tactics.

The functional loss of Sevastopol, I think, has incredible geostrategic implications, and perhaps may even be helpful in the settlement of this war at some point in the future. And that is a tremendous credit to Ukraine’s Navy, to the assistance from their allies, like yourself. And, you know, Russia has just got to be aware that they do not hold a winning hand in the Black Sea. They’ve lost. And they can innovate a little bit here and there, mess around with their tac air and helicopters, but they’ve lost this fight.

RADM Mattis: The question is what can Ukraine do in the near term to keep Russia on its back foot?

There is no perfect platform here. There is no perfect tactic. It is really this combination and variation of tactics, capabilities, and integrated effects to continue to derive the opponent onto their back foot and force them to adjust to you, rather than you having adjust to them.

I think this is a warning shot to conventional navies that we must take seriously our ability to counter USVs and other integrated effects – USVs and UASes – against our forces.

I would argue we are beyond experimentation with robotic autonomous systems. We are now in a period of operationalization and rehearsal. And so our ability to create A2/AD bubbles and defeat A2/AD bubbles with robotic autonomous systems is an essential capability that we must develop. And, again, those are clear lessons out of the Black Sea. And we must move with alacrity and a sense of urgency that we haven’t seen.

Dr. Pettyjohn: We need to find more cost-effective ways of countering these irregular and asymmetric tactics, as well as harnessing them and incorporating them into our own operations.

Col. Pence: The war in Ukraine is being fought by men and women with lives, families, thoughts and fears. Welcome to the Human Domain panel of Conflict in Focus: Lessons from Russia-Ukraine.

Lieutenant General David Barno (Ret): Well, I think it’s important to recognize – and I think the reason the war in Ukrainians has got so much attention – is it’s the first epic land conflict of the 21st century. We can look back on U.S. operations in the first decade of the century in Afghanistan and Iraq. They don’t compare with what we’re seeing in Ukraine today – the length of the conflict, number of casualties. The British Ministry of Defense reported that the Russians alone have lost as many as 430,000 killed and wounded last year in 2024. Staggering numbers. The Ukrainians somewhere significantly less than that, numbers are in dispute, 60,000 or so. But this is a massive land campaign in Eastern Europe, of all places, which was very unexpected, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

Major Ben Connable (Ret): Will is not something that you can measure. However, it can be assessed. And thus far, we’ve done almost nothing collectively – and I’ll point fingers at the United States here, and that’s what we did in that report – that we’ve done almost nothing to improve our ability to understand or assess will to fight. And you saw that in the early days of the Ukraine conflict. And we generally assessed that the Russians were going to fight no matter what and we generally assessed that the Ukrainians were going to quit no matter what. And that turned out not to be true.

And what was fascinating at the time is there was congressional testimony after the 2022 invasion. And General Scott Berrier, who is the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, actually apologized to Congress for not getting that right. And you go back and look at the apologies that were made after we misjudged Afghan will to fight, we misjudged Vietnamese will to fight, we misjudged Iraqi will to fight. So we kind of got a trend going here.

Colonel Mark Cancian (Ret): Stuff happens. The unexpected happens. When you look at this war, people couldn’t believe that in the 21st century one country would try to conquer another one. It seemed so 18th century and outmoded. But that’s exactly what happened.

Lieutenant Colonel Volodymyr Dutko: It’s very difficult conditions there because everything wants to destroy you.

Col. Pence: And we’re able to recreate that for us to look at here. So imagine in the human domain a type of drone like this, that is observing your every move, and is un-jammable. What you see underneath the UAV there is a receptacle that can hold a fiber optic cable.

Lt. Gen. Barno: I don’t think the reality of what drones mean on the battlefield is really sunk into U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, or special operators. It is a gamechanger. It is not anything we’ve encountered before. We certainly haven’t encountered the psychological impact of having, you know, a machine looking at you all the time that is devoted to killing you, with an operator who’s going to track you down on the battlefield, individually in some cases, to kill you.

Col. Cancian: There was a lot of expectation that drones would be important in the next conflict. Just about every thinker who looked at the future talked about drones. But what we didn’t expect was that it was small drones that were going to be the real factor here. We were thinking more in terms of Predator and Reaper, the kinds of drones that we used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Major Connable: There’s no doubt that tanks still have a critical role on the battlefield. And they’re still performing the functions that tanks have historically performed, which is to provide shock, speed, mobile protected firepower up to the line of contact.

Col. Cancian: That things didn’t change. A lot of people thought that, you know, future conflicts were going to be long-range, precision strike, push-button wars. And what we’re seeing in these clips is trenches and artillery. I mean, it looks a lot like World War I, but with some additional capabilities.

The dog that didn’t bark, and that is cyber. And it’s not that cyber was not an issue here. There’s been a lot of back and forth. The defenses that the Ukrainians put in place turned out to be quite effective, and then their work with civilian firms, you know, like Google and many of the others, you know, was very effective. But if you go back and look at the literature before the wars, you know, people were saying, oh, the wars will be decided by the ones and zeros before the first shot is even fired. And there’s been nothing remotely like that. So I think we also have to watch for things that didn’t happen, as well as the things that happened.

Lt. Gen. Barno: The U.S. military invests more probably than any military in the world in planning, in preparation for fights that it can imagine. What about the fights it doesn’t imagine? How much time and energy and effort gets put into instilling a culture of rapid adaptation once you get in a battle where things don’t look like what you expected, and aren’t the plans that you have made, take you offline from all of your anticipated outcomes? How do you make sure the force can quickly adjust to that?

Major Connable: Did you ever ask somebody who’s ever served in uniform or is still in uniform, how good are we learning lessons from wars? I think the answer is generally not terribly good, and I’m being kind. To be fair to the U.S. military, though, they immediately implemented this enormous Ukraine lessons learned program in stride, as the war was occurring.

Col. Cancian: I’m reminded of a quotation from an Army officer named Fehrenbach after the Korean War. And he made the comment that if you want to control territory – you can fly over it, you can sail around it. But if you really want to control it, occupy it, then you have to do it the same way the Roman legions did. That is, by sending your soldiers into the mud and to take control of it. And I think we’re, again, seeing that in this war.

Captain Luke Slivinski: The war between Russia and Ukraine is highly dependent on industrial base outputs in a dynamic and rapidly evolving conflict environment, driving the acquisition cycle. Welcome to the Defense Industrial Base Panel of our series Conflict in Focus: Lessons from Russia-Ukraine.

Phillip Karber: For example, in the area of drones, there is a major change in this competition every six months, so the lifecycle is very short. And in all honesty, we in the West, including the United States, are just not keeping up.

Kateryna Bondar: I see a big obstacle on developing self-sufficient Ukrainian defense industry at that time was the outflow of human capital. Basically, a lot of really talented engineers from those construction bureaus and design bureaus, they migrated abroad.

I think the main factor for Ukrainian success with drones and innovative technology is this, I would say, civil-military fusion.

The iteration cycle is really fast. I would say for software-based weapons systems it’s even faster than half a year. It’s like it can happen one week, two weeks.

Mark Valentine: The way our requirements system operates in the United States military for the most part we are almost forced to fight the last war because those are the requirements that come down, and if you want to win the contract you have to adhere to those requirements. And oftentimes those requirements are not informed by what is happening in today’s world.

Dr. Karber: What’s happening at the front is just this utter proliferation. It raises a really interesting – I’m an old Marine grunt. I can’t imagine fighting on a battlefield of the future where these things are just dominant.

Ms. Bondar: Well, I would agree that probably the swarms is the future. But observation from the battlefield right now is basically that we’re not there yet, because for the real swarm we need AI. We need more sophisticated software for the drones on those nodes in that swarm to communicate, to make decisions.

Dr. Karber: – the massive proliferation of these things. And the – you know, tanks are now vulnerable. And that was presumably, because of the mobility and armor, the most survivable vehicle on the battlefield. And they’re dying like crazy, from drones.

Mr. Valentine: Again, it’s about deterrence. And if we can’t demonstrate that we have the capability to do something, that’s how deterrence fails and wars start.

So working with foreign governments like the government of Ukraine – you mentioned it earlier – the ITAR restrictions are very cloying. And so, basically, if you have a small drone that has a thermal sensor on it, you have some form of ITAR control, whether it’s full ITAR or, you know, EAR99. You’ve got to get some sort of export license. And that significantly slows things down.

Well, here’s my ask. The thermal sensor is a commercial item. You can literally buy it on Amazon. But somehow now when you buy a drone on Amazon and you tape them together, you’ve now created something that is ITAR restricted seems a bit ridiculous. So I do think the United States needs to review some of that.

Colonel Matthew Slusher: Over the past three years of conflict, modern warfare has undergone a remarkable transformation. Welcome to part one of the Air and Space Domain, a special two-part episode of our series Conflict in Focus: Lessons from Russia-Ukraine.

Austin Gray: If you or I are in a foxhole doing our jobs, and we have a drone, we have a much longer range at which we can hit our adversary, right?

Major General Gregory Gagnon: Because space superiority unlocks all the other key capabilities of our air forces, our ground forces and our maritime forces. That’s why those forces can be 40 percent smaller today – which is 30 years later – but more lethal and more effective, because space superiority is greater than the sum of its parts.

Col. Slusher: We continue our in-depth exploration of modern warfare and strategic insights. Welcome to Part Two of the Air and Space Domain, a special two-part episode of our series, Conflict in Focus: Lessons from Russia-Ukraine.

Lieutenant General Lance Landrum: The thing that is the really driving force behind the interoperability, the integration, and the ability to shoot, move, and communicate, really stems from superiority in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Air Marshall Johnny Stringer: NATO, and indeed Western airpower, kind of come out of two long shadows. So the first one, which really now has been reset by the invasion, was the 30 years that we won the Cold War, which saw us conceptually and also physically disinvested. And the second, about 20 years long, was the impact of counterinsurgency, or counterterrorism campaigning.

Krista Auchenbach: The war in Ukraine has demonstrated significant strides in data technology and the integration of new capabilities in commercial services in warfighting. Today we examine the role of space and data capabilities in the changing character of war. Welcome to the Space and Data Domain of our series, Conflict in Focus: Lessons from the Russia-Ukraine War.

Giorgi Tskhakaia: There was no domain where they were not superior to Ukraine.

David Gauthier: At the end of the day the private companies themselves used their architecture to enable this delivery directly to forces in Ukraine and see the tactical use of commercial imagery on the battlefield.

Aaron Jaffe: We need to be able to evolve our sustainment and logistics technologies to match the pace of plans and operations and intelligence functions.

This environment has highlighted the primacy of judicious decisions, and not just in a DOD context of being able to move 20 percent faster, or 30 percent faster, but be able to move one, two, three orders of magnitude faster, both with the volume and the quality of decisions that you have to make, integrated across warfighting functions.

Mr. Tskhakaia: And if you are not innovating constantly, you are going to be losing anyway.

So if you have a superiority in the data, then you have a huge advantage. So all the features that can help you, and all the solutions that can help you in that, is very valuable and important.

Lieutenant Colonel Scott Murphy: For over three years, Ukraine, a nation of less than 35 million people, has blunted and resisted the aggression of Russia, a nation with a population of over 145 million. Though engaged in a struggle for its very survival, by leveraging the strength and talent of the entire Ukrainian population Ukraine has not only been able to fight a significantly larger aggressor, but has improved its industrial base, grown its economy, and become a leader in the evolution of military technology. Today we examine the importance of leveraging whole of society actions to create resiliency, both prior to and during war, for our series Conflict in Focus: Lessons from the Russia-Ukraine War.

Kathleen McInnis: They stood because there was will. It’s decisive. But it’s – but it’s a secret sauce that we tend not to pay much attention to because we’re thinking about widgets and we’re thinking about tech and all the things.

Iryna Nykorak: Look, from here you can see there’s a special damper inside which is minimized pressure in chest area. And here, special part which can protect another part of your body.

 (Video presentation ends.)

Dr. Jones: All right. That was great.

Col Pence: Go ahead, Seth.

Dr. Jones: Yeah. No, go ahead, Scott.

Col Pence: Before we get started with the folks on the panel, we will go over the digital report. So we got to condense nine to 10 hours of material down to that 20-minute video, and thank you for watching that.

We further condensed those highlights and those insights into this digital report and it’s just 10 primary insights. We used our office of secretary of defense military fellow Ms. Krista Auchenbach. She whiteboarded with us and what do we really need to take from all these transcripts and those are what’s printed out in the hallway – all the summaries of the transcripts – what really matters, and that’s what’s been really important for many of us who struggle to find out what really matters from this ongoing war.

So we’ll go over the digital report that released just yesterday here at CSIS, “Insights for Future Conflicts.” It starts with the – this is a Tactical Operations Center that fades out into blueprints. It’s divided into three sections: weapons of modern warfare, capabilities, and timeless realities of warfare.

The first section here is on the weapons. In the first one Colonel Nathan Lewis, who’s with us today, addresses an elephant in the room and that is this was warfare between a nuclear-armed power and this – what we used is some of the CSIS’s program on nuclear issues to talk about the back and forth between Russian nuclear threats and incremental aid to Ukraine and how that might have prevented a nuclear detonation. Here we have here on the chart that’s presented is the estimated global nuclear warhead inventories.

The next insight is on innovation through drones and this was written by Captain Quinton Packard from the U.S. Navy, and this is another one of the key points that we think of when we think of the Ukraine war.

This is the panel that you got to see some highlights from and it addresses some of the adaptability and the innovations that are occurring on the ground and behind enemy lines in Ukraine.

This third one is the role of tanks. As you saw from some of the highlights there, despite the videos that we’re seeing of tanks being destroyed by drones, to a man and woman the Ukrainian and military professionals are finding tanks still relevant in the next warfare.

Here we have the chart that we were able to develop here was the estimated Russian tank losses, which is ironic because the point really is that the tanks remain relevant on the battlefield.

The next section is the capabilities and that’s what really is where the rubber meets the road in this war and that’s what we can do now prewar with great power conflict to enhance our competitiveness.

The first one is on supply and Captain Luke Slivinski, who is here with us today from the U.S. Coast Guard, talked about resupply, the fight at speed, and how adaptations and using data integration allow the Ukrainians to resupply, use the contributions from Western powers to rush those to the front. And the iDeas Lab, led by Sarah Grace and Gina Kim, were able to make this interactive graph that shows the contributions and where they arrived in Ukraine.

The next insight was written by Matt Slusher, who’s with us today from the U.S. Air Force. His panels were on the air and space domain but he focused on contested logistics. One of the critical things that matters behind the front lines and resupply operations are the logistics that take it from a base station to the theater of battle, and this is going to be something that the United States will have to face if it goes into great power conflict in the future.

The next two are written by our colleague Ms. Krista Auchenbach from the office of secretary of defense. The first one is AI-enabled data integration at scale, a critical field of adaptability in which Ukraine has made many gains, and we’re working with its Western counterparts. Here we had Palantir Senior Vice President Aaron Jaffe talk about how some of those were relevant in the battlefield.

And the next section was on the centrality of the space domain. She wrote about that and pointed out one of the insights is both sides in this battle dependent on the space domain for weapons precision, and despite attempts by Russia to defeat the Starlink network and the proliferated Low Earth Orbit satellite infrastructure they were unable to.

The next insight and section went into timeless realities of warfare. What we saw in Ukraine are three insights that we see in history and we can expect to see in future war. The first one is – and it might be the most important – the will to fight makes a difference. We see broad resilience in the Ukrainian force which allow them to stand toe to toe with a much stronger, more powerful military.

The graph – the radar chart that ends this section really conceptualizes this. This is a comparison of key conflict variables with Ukraine relative to Russia. You see Ukraine there in yellow and then Russia is plotted there in blue. So you see it by population, by GDP, by firepower. We put those together to find just what a stretch Ukraine was doing in going toe to do with Russia in this war.

The next insight in timeless realities is whole of population and what this is really trying to say is that gender integration in the military led to a comparative advantage.

And the next insight is – and we end with the role of soft power and soft power yielding tangible results. So the story of Ukraine, the story of the underdog fighting against a more powerful neighbor, allowed for donations and contributions from Western nations that were really significant. They led to tangible results.

So thanks for listening to us as we went into this report. Thanks for watching the videos. And now we’ll turn it over to our panel, where we will have some discussion about these issues.

Dr. Jones: Thanks, Scott. So we do have an opportunity for folks to ask questions. I have the tablet up here. So if you could – feel free to ask audience questions here. We should have a QR code that you can ask. We already have some questions that I’ll get to a little bit later. So what we have up here, most of our military fellows. So we’ve got with us, Scott Pence, Quinton Packard, Luke Slivinski, Nathan Lewis, and Matt Slusher. We don’t have two of our colleagues, unable to come today, Krista Auchenbach, who did fantastic work for this, and Scott Murphy. So we will bring in their insights into the discussion. My name is Seth Jones. I run the Defense and Security Program, along with Emily Harding, here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

I think what’s been interesting in just watching all of you conduct your research, analysis, and then move into the video and the written component of it, is how comprehensive you’ve been in covering a range of the domains. But also that you’ve been able to go deep into a number of different areas. What I’d like to do is sort of have a conversation, but I do want to hit the key focus areas. Again, I think what’s particularly valuable about the work that all of you have done is the insights you’ve given really at the operator level. You know, going all the way down to the tactical level, and getting a real feel for what is changing in the character of warfare, and the implications for where warfare is headed.

So I wonder, QP, if we can start with you. You’re a Navy captain with years of experience at the tactical and operational level. It’s been interesting to me – and you showed a little bit the film – that while the Russians, certainly before the war, I think, had most assessed, understandably, dominance in the maritime domain, that actually they ran into massive challenges in the Black Sea. And the Ukrainians were remarkably successful, essentially operating without a navy against the Russians. So what are your takeaways on the maritime domain of war?

Captain Quinton Packard: Yeah. Thanks, Seth. The Ukrainian fight in the maritime, even more so than, I think, in the air and on land, is an epic underdog story. As was alluded to by you and also in the video, you know, when we say that they didn’t have a navy to begin with, it’s pretty true. The Ukrainian Navy was captured – the majority of it was captured in 2014, when Russia seized Sevastopol. And so the remaining ships that they had, and ships is kind of an overstatement. It’s more patrol boats. They had one flagship, which was a 30-year-old former Soviet destroyer. Which in the opening days of the war they took a dangerous gambit, and they scuttled their own ship in an attempt to ensure that the Russians didn’t seize the ship and use it to their advantage.

So, you know, starting from a place of having really no navy to speak of, they then embarked on an irregular, asymmetric warfare campaign, where they have seen almost continuous success in the Black Sea that really can’t be overstated. From the – you know, from the opening days of the war, you know, in April they sunk the Black Sea Fleet flagship, the Moskva. Which is a great story that I can definitely go into if we have time later on. That’s was a one of my favorites. But from then on, leveraging both cruise missiles and then, you know, a little bit later on the development of USVs, unmanned surface vehicles, which is a fancy way of saying maritime drones, they have kept Russia on the back foot.

And they have maintained the initiative throughout the entire campaign, to the point where, as was mentioned by Admiral Mattis, 40 percent of the Black Sea Fleet is now either man-made reefs at the bottom of the Black Sea, or they’re damaged beyond being able to participate in the fight.

Dr. Jones: You know, one of the things, QP, when I was in Ukraine last year, and the energy minister was walking through – in President Zelensky’s office – was walking through the strikes, the cruise ballistic missiles, and the drones that were targeting the electricity grid. They were coming from the air. So cruise missiles launched, for example, from aircraft or ground-based launches. You know, or certainly drones, along those lines. There was almost nothing coming from the maritime domain. And that is a fundamental shift from the way the Russians fought the war in Syria, which is they had air. You know, they had limited ground operations. Most of that was done elsewhere. But they had a lot of stuff coming in from the maritime domain. So how difficult was that for the Russians, to conduct joint campaign, essentially, to take the Navy out of the – out of the fight?

Captain Packard: The Ukrainians?

Dr. Jones: The Russians. How difficult – how difficult for the Russians was it to fight basically with their navy out of the fight?

Captain Packard: Yes, that’s – that was one of the strategic objectives that they had that we went into during my panel. Which was they wanted to use the maritime in order to launch effective strikes into Ukraine, because they had enjoyed that success in the past. And so it really – you know, the Ukrainians succeeded not only in stopping them from conducting an amphibious assault, which the Russians were poised to do, but really pushing them out of the east – I’m sorry – the western half of the Black Sea. Pushing them back even out of Sevastopol, which is where they had their headquarters, back to Novorossiysk, which is another 200 miles to the east. It really hamstrung the Russians and all of their strategic objectives through this asymmetric warfare. It was fabulous.

Dr. Jones: Yeah. Interesting. And we may come back to the joint efforts in a moment and some of the challenges the Russians face.

But, Luke, Coast Guard captain. You focused on something a little broader than many of the others, which they focused on different domains of warfare. And you looked at the industrial base. So what industry – from your perspective, what industry leaders in the U.S. need to take away what lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war?

Captain Slivinski: Yeah, thanks, Seth. Again, it was fascinating to lead an overarching panel. I think everyone’s domain depends a certain amount on logistics and supply, and industry being able to provide what’s needed to support the fight.

I think the key takeaway was the speed that’s necessary in the acquisition cycle, from requirements all the way through delivering what it is that that frontline soldier needs to win the war. That happened at a speed that I don’t think global conflict has seen to this point. And, you know, initially the Ukrainian industry was unable to provide the artillery, kind of the standard munitions that Ukraine needed to hold Russia off. And it forced them to pivot to drones, right?

Like, drones is a big buzzword here as part of the Russia-Ukraine war, but it’s not – it’s not necessarily going to be drones in the future. It might be something else. And as – there were many comments throughout the panels of, you know, essentially, a big lesson learned, something happened in the conflict, and they had to pivot. They had to pivot. Russia – I’m sorry – Ukraine pivoted to drones. And they were able to construct them. Now I think they’re constructing, I think, maybe 5 million is their goal. And that’s domestic. They’re now able to domestically produce drones on a scale that I think Europe, U.S. combined, we can’t even come close to touching that.

And the other key aspect was the fight on the frontline is changing week to week, day to day, almost hour to hour. And the type of drone that might be needed, the type of technology might change between, you know, we need a maritime drone. We have a land attack conflict that’s happening. And it’s different. And Ukraine was able to take their drone platforms and adapt them. You know, make them ISR, make them attack. And they can do that on the fly. And they also brought technicians in directly to the frontline in drone workshops, where they were able to repair the drones as well as update them as necessary to keep pace with the speed of changes from their adversary in Russia.

Dr. Jones: So one issue that certainly came up, and I was going to see if I could pull Scott in along these lines, and others if they want to jump in, is, you know, the U.S. industrial base was taxed during the war. And one of the good examples of this is probably 155 millimeter rounds. So, you know, we had over the course of the first two to three years of the war, we had in at CSIS, Bill LaPlante, undersecretary for acquisition sustainment. We had Doug Bush, assistant secretary of the Army. In to talk through the efforts at the U.S. military made, including the Army, on shifting to how do you supply an army and a military fighting in a protracted war, not just a war that may last a few weeks or months, but years. So just curious, how did the army sort of evolve in its thinking and action in keeping up with, you know, constant munitions going through, or equipment breaking down, the need for additional logistics and supplies? Because the industrial base hit all the domains.

Col. Pence: Right. Yeah. The Army and the joint force had to create commands and committees that focused on continuing the production, and increasing the production, stateside. And then, just like the contested logistics insight, facilitating that to where it was needed.

Captain Slivinski: And, Seth, really, the supply chain security is hugely important, right? All the components. I think Ukraine has seen that everything that goes into making a drone, the ability to keep those supply lines open. You know, if you don’t have that, Kate Bondar had mentioned you also need the people that are there that can construct these things, that can run the industrial base. So it’s – you need the people, you need the supply chains and the supplies. And then you have to get the, whatever it is, the technology, out to the front line.

Dr. Jones: And the workforce, at least here, to produce, too. Yeah.

Captain Packard: And in the fabrication of the maritime drones, they really had a garage industry, where people were, no kidding, in their garages, like, disassembling jet skis and then reassembling them into these – into these drones that were going to be used for a completely different purpose. Completely disaggregated amongst the community, and far from the front lines. And then those supply chains had to move those individual pieces and fabricate them together – you know, put them together in order to – in order to get the finished product, which was incredible.

Dr. Jones: One of the things that struck me, too, is how connected some of the frontline forces in Ukraine were to industry and to companies. Because that sort of tweaking, in some cases it was more than that, as the Russians found ways to change their EW frequencies – I mean, it was – the speed – I mean, you all have talked about it – the speed of warfare changed dramatically.

Captain Slivinski: Yeah, Seth, another key thing that we saw was that the U.S. and U.S. industry essentially going into the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the second round here, was that, you know, we were used to winning with large drones, right, where we controlled the airspace, we controlled the electromagnetic spectrum. And early in the conflict, donors were coming with all sorts of drone technology from U.S. industry and others. And that largely failed, because those drones were made to operate in an uncontested aerial environment. And that’s essentially what started kicking off the need to rapidly innovate. And they realized that they could not do that unless they brought, like, teams of U.S. technology experts and engineers to the front line in Ukraine to help them keep the upper edge against Russian EW.

Dr. Jones: Yeah, and also, you know, what the Ukrainians ended up needing, in part, was attritable systems that they could use, but knew that they were going to get – eventually get shot down. So you don’t use a big MQ-9 for that kind of a tactical purpose if you’re going to lose the – you know, if you’re going to lose a system that is that expensive. Or, what the Ukrainians also looked for was longer-range, higher-payload drones. But again, sort of one-way strike drones that – again, that you’re going to lose. So it was a very different use than I think U.S. had often done with its Predators or Reapers. So, different.

So I want to come to Matt. Colonel. Should we call you Slush, by the way? (Laughter.) OK. Colonel in the Air Force. Experience as a battle manager and also air defense in Europe. Your panels focused on air domain. I found it interesting actually, tracking Russian air operations in Syria, including their use of the reconnaissance strike complex, how much they struggled in Ukraine. They failed to establish air dominance in the war. I think there were some questions about how well they did air-land battle and integrated with the Russian land forces. But as you look at the Russia-Ukraine war, what is your sense about some of the primary insights, and ones that came from your panels?

Colonel Matthew Slusher: Yeah. Thanks, Seth. So I interviewed four very smart, relevant experts across two different episodes. But if I had to kind of summarize or boil that down – and a lot of people here have been, I think, reinforcing it and hitting on it, and that’s air superiority. And I think that it is not guaranteed anymore. I think it’s a luxury that the U.S. has had for decades. And I think it’s been taken for granted. And there’s evidence of that. So as we just mentioned, neither side, Russia or Ukraine, achieving air superiority. I think air superiority brings a lot of enhancement and helps out all the other joint war fighting functions that the other services will take into an operation.

And I think if you don’t have it, I think it severely hampers and puts at risk the joint war fighting operations. So it’s almost – it’s appeared to me that maybe we should either redefine air superiority, or almost add to its definition. I think if you’re going to dominate the air, I think you have to dominate the electromagnetic spectrum. I think you’re going to need to successfully integrate autonomous systems into your operations. And then, lastly, I think effective, resilient command and control structure in that modern battlefield.

Dr. Jones: What is your sense – just going back to this issue of jointness – what is your sense of how well or not the Russians were able to integrate air and land during the war? And how much – how much of that came out in your panel?

Col. Slusher: Yeah. You know, I would go back to the fact that neither side, especially Russia, achieved air superiority. And that’s probably going to be because of the Ukrainian air defenses. It’s going to be because of electronic warfare. And then the – and then the contested electromagnetic spectrum. I think in the future, or for either side with the current operation or us going forward, I think we’re going to need to secure – either side is going to have to secure their communications, secure their GPS targeting and navigation, and secure their sensor data, because all of those things are vulnerable to jamming and cyberattack.

Dr. Jones: Thanks. I want to come to Scott then on the – on the land side. You wrote in one of the key insights, tanks are not dead. Maybe the Marine Corps would disagree with you there, because it largely got rid of them, or at least at one point. But so did you always see this as the case, or – I mean, how did the war – how did the war change or even solidify your view on land systems, like tanks?

Col. Pence: It definitely has. And a lot of us have been watching this carefully and wondering what we need to take from it. And when we had one of the ministers of Parliament from Ukraine, Roman Kostenko, come to visit us in December, he had said he remembered in 2014 everybody was afraid of tanks. And now in 2022 – it was in 2024 when he visited – they just looked for a way who’s going to kill it most exciting – in the most exciting fashion. But that, as we pressed the issue and talked to the actual Ukrainian leaders on the ground, they said that people who ignore tanks do so at their own peril. When they – they’ve seen soldiers killed because they do expect someone with a drone or someone with a Javelin is going to eliminate this tank in their front. But the tank still remains a powerful force.

And what Ben Jensen was able to bring up in the panel is that what we see as tanks as being direct fire weapons may evolve in the wars of the future. In which tanks, with the great power base they have, are able to supply electromagnetic protection for the soldiers around them, able to launch drones as a platform, and able to exist possibly in a hybrid or battery power so it would be more quiet. And what we saw with General George and Secretary Driscoll from the Army, their new Army Transformation Initiative, just last week on 1 May, we see the embracing of the M1E3 tank, which does just that. It’s got a hybrid motor. It has power for electronic warfare and it’s got power for drones, in addition to its direct-fire capability.

Dr. Jones: Would you say, just stepping back when it comes to other systems, if fighting vehicles, the – would you have sort of similar lessons to other types of land systems, not just tanks?

Col. Pence: It always comes back to would you want to do battle with a force that has tanks against you without tanks, or would you like to also have an armored force? And it’s a pretty easy answer.

Dr. Jones: Yeah. Seems like hard to take territory if you don’t have a combination of dismounted infantry and armor to punch through the lines, because I think at the end of day I think it was Colonel Mark Cancian who said that in your session, that you can’t control territory from the air or from the maritime domain entirely; that you need to do it also from the land.

Col. Pence: Absolutely right.

Captain Packard: If I could – if I can chime in, so the tank isn’t dead, and neither is the aircraft carrier. (Laughter.) I feel obligated as a sailor to point that out.

And in the Black Sea specifically, despite the success of Ukraine in taking down so many of Russia’s capital ships, Ukraine – or, I’m sorry, the Black Sea is a unique atmosphere. It’s a – it’s a confined area. You can’t put a bunch of drones into the middle of the Pacific and say go get ‘em and expect to have any kind of, you know, A2/AD success. So, you know, in the Taiwan Strait there is – there is a potential. There is – that would be an opportune place to have drones play a part. But large-scale capital ships, there’s absolutely still a requirement.

Dr. Jones: Sounds good. Well, would be interested in maybe a little bit later if there’s a debate about that. (Laughter.) I will tell you, once the shooting starts – not that the aircraft carrier’s dead, but I don’t think I’d want to be on one once the shooting starts in the Pacific. But anyway, that’s just me.

Yeah?

Captain Slivinski: Real quick, though, Seth, you know, the U.S. industrial base, right, for shipbuilding has obviously gotten a lot of recent attention. We’ve realized that we’re unable to construct the, you know, number of ships at the speed that the services need.

But as we’re doing that, I would – I would ask that the U.S. take a look at, you know, what is the future, right? Like, do we need that many of that type of ship in the actual future, or is there a different technology that then kind of relegates the ship-to-ship kind of maritime conflict?

Dr. Jones: Yeah, good point.

All right. Let’s go to Nate, and then I’ve got a bunch of questions from the audience. Nate, Chris is not here either, but I wanted to bring in the space and the data domain and get your sense about how much access to space and data we can expect in the next war.

Colonel Nathan Lewis: It will greatly depend on who’s fighting and at what level of warfare, we’re talking a border skirmish or a full on country v. country.

The short answer is it’ll depend on the commitment of either country, right, how much they’re willing to take the fight to either space or to ground nodes that control the data. So both sides can expect to probably have some kind of contested data environment, but the magnitude of that will greatly depend on who’s fighting.

Dr. Jones: Sounds good.

Well, let’s – we are almost at time, but I want to get to a couple of questions. I think the first one here, from Emily H. at CSIS, is on – is probably, Scott, I’m going to go to you first and open it up to others if they – if they want to answer: Given trends on the battlefield, especially in the land domain, what are the prospects for a successful Russian land offensive in the next several months? What is your sense? How do you weigh that?

Col. Pence: You have to use history as a guide. And as you look – the Institute for the Study of War does a great job of tracking day-to-day territorial advantage – possession in the ground on the Russia-Ukraine war and to map that. As you look at it, it changes a whole lot in February of ’22 and it hasn’t changed much since maybe 2023, when Ukraine regained many of the lost territory. You see a stalemate. So if they were able to do a broad, successful land offensive, they would have done so by now. I would say – and I can’t predict the future, but I would say they would probably be repulsed just as they have time and time again from some resilient Ukrainian defenses.

Dr. Jones: How does this – you know, the Army, or Scott here on the Marine Corps, what is your sense about the challenges of this war for maneuver? I mean, it has been – the Russians have struggled in maneuver warfare, and just sort of – you’re raising the prospect that it probably is not going to get better, at least from your perspective. Would the U.S. fight differently? Or how –

Col. Pence: Yes.

Dr. Jones: I mean, what do you take to be a lesson there?

Col. Pence: One of the root causes of why the Russians have not been able to mass their effects and fight the doctrine that they – we’ve trained to fight against is that they’re still leading with a very Soviet centralized doctrine of top-down control. What the Ukrainians have embraced and what the U.S. has in their doctrine is a mission command philosophy of command and control in which you have – you have individual initiative at the lowest levels able to – and then you have lower-level commanders able to take acceptable risk when opportunities present themselves on the battlefield. So as long as you have a free-thinking enemy with some equipment against a non-free-thinking enemy that’s dependent on higher-up commands, you’ll always have that disparity of advantage.

Captain Slivinski: We’ve got – we still – sorry.

Dr. Jones: And then I got a question for you after you’re done.

Captain Slivinski: Oh, sure. And we’ve seen that, you know, like, pushing authority and responsibility kind of like further down the acquisition chain as well on the industrial side, where Ukraine had a singular domestic defense production industry, and that has now just spidered out, again, into these, you know, capabilities of producing millions of drones in multiple factories, places, sources of supply, again. And there is risk there when there isn’t a robust control of the capabilities-requirements cycle.

In the U.S., we know that that, especially for major systems, can be an eight-year, 10-year process, but the speed of war is moving far too fast. And again, some of that risk that has been part of Ukraine’s success in pushing it down to lower levels has been pivotal.

Dr. Jones: So one follow-up question for you, and we’re about to – this may be the last question, depending on the timing. This is from Nicholas from John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, and the question is on the industrial base. And so you covered this, and a number of people may have touched on this as well in their work: Has the absence of a military industrial complex in Ukraine enabled the Ukrainians to have more agility on the battlefield? And if so, does the presence of the U.S.’s military industrial complex constrain American agility? Interesting question.

Captain Slivinski: Yeah, certainly an interesting question. And I think, Seth, that had Ukraine been able to do it over again, they probably would have wanted to, you know, like, have a construct where they are now, right? And I think that we probably see that as well in the United States that, you know, our industry, our 10-year requirements process, we recognize that it’s just not going to work in the future. And there’s been several recent executive orders with reforming acquisitions, building up the maritime industrial base. Like, we recognize it, but I hope that we’re able to make our processes, rules, laws, regulations reflect what is actually going to win a future conflict.

Dr. Jones: Yeah.

Last question. I’m going to ask everybody just to keep a short answer. Same question for all of you. This comes from Mark at CSIS, which is – and starting with Nate, we’ll just go this way: Real briefly, what was your greatest surprise in doing this research?

Col. Lewis: Quite simply, the level of individual commitment through every Ukrainian, from raising funds to buy more drones, from pitching in and doing some part of the military effort, even if it wasn’t directly building drones or going straight to the battlefield. Everybody’s involved. And that says a lot about their country.

Dr. Jones: Yeah, it sounds a little bit like part of what Ben Connable in the discussion was getting to in his will-to-fight comments.

Col. Lewis: Right.

Col. Slusher: For me, I would just say, you know, just what a point in the history timeline that are in, an inflection point of just where things are just transforming so fast across all domains and in technology. And it’s just a – glad I’m here to witness it.

Dr. Jones: Sounds good.

Col. Pence: And mine goes back to the tanks. I set out to prove – to prove or disprove whether they’re still relevant on the battlefield, and I had a – I had a(n) inkling that they probably were going away, and all I found was more and more evidence of why they remain relevant.

Dr. Jones: Sounds good.

So is yours going to be aircraft carriers, then? No?

Captain Packard: No.

Dr. Jones: OK. (Laughs.)

Captain Packard: It’s going to be maritime drones. (Laughter.) The success with which Ukraine has both written the book and then continued to evolve the use of asymmetric maritime drones and the success that they’ve had in that.

Dr. Jones: Sounds good.

Luke, you get the last word here.

Captain Slivinski: Oh, thank you. So, at the end of my panel, my panelists talked about drone swarms. They’re not necessarily there yet, but I think the role of AI on the battlefield, we recognize that that will be necessary to control a swarm of any type of unmanned system. And you know, it’s dangerous when there’s drones that are able to kind of pick off ones, twos on the battlefield, but what does that look like when now there’s a thousand of them and they’re coming at your formation? So, scary.

Dr. Jones: Thank you very much. We can’t finish without also thanking the iLab and the production folks, led by Dhanesh, and helping put all this together. And also, Krista, not able to be here, and Scott, also not able to be here, who were instrumental with all of you in doing this great work.

Thank you all for attending. If you could join me in thanking this illustrious panel for the great work not just that they’ve done – you can see it here – but all of the video work that they’ve laid out. On the way out for those here, please pick up a copy of their primary conclusions. But if you could join me in thanking them, please do that. (Applause.)

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