Countries around the world are drawing lessons from Europe’s first high-intensity war since 1945. Picture: BLOOMBERG
There are also more than 700 new self-propelled heavy artillery pieces planned, more than six times as many as in Germany’s arsenal, and three times as many advanced battle tanks as Britain and France can field, combined.
For many countries nearer to Ukraine, takeaways include sharply increased defence spending, greater home-grown production capacity and expanded fleets of tanks, artillery and air defence. Even Russia-friendly Hungary is bulking up, fearing that a more volatile and unpredictable security environment is here to stay. Finland and Sweden abandoned decades of diplomatic caution to apply for Nato membership.
Britain’s BAE Systems, for example, says its bid to produce a replacement for the US Bradley fighting vehicle, which the company builds, now includes added armour on top, to defend against modern antitank missiles that strike from above where protection is weakest, as well as fixings to mount counterdrone weapons.
Many European and US officials believe Putin is determined to subordinate Russia’s former Soviet neighbourhood and will seek to rebuild his army, regardless of the war’s outcome. Estonia’s annual intelligence report, estimates four years will be needed for Russian units depleted in Ukraine to reconstitute on the small country’s border.
Diehl Defence is ramping up output of its IRIS-T antimissile system — praised by Ukraine for a near-100% strike rate — which will play a role in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s initiative to create a European missile defence shield. A letter of intent to join the so-called European Sky Shield was signed 14 Nato members plus Finland.France, too, is looking to restructure its forces for high-intensity warfare.
The UK defence ministry will ask for £10bn to match inflation and an additional boost in funds to reconstitute a military that was “hollowed out” over decades, the person said. The decision to slash force numbers is seen, after Ukraine, as a strategic error. Many lessons from the war in Ukraine have less to do with hardware than the softer issues of logistics, training and strategy that have no borders.
Still, there are takeaways from Ukraine for Taiwan and its allies, including the importance of the training that Kyiv’s forces received in asymmetric warfare during the eight years between Putin’s two attempts to subjugate Russia’s neighbour. “That training, conducted with our allies, was far more effective than we realised,” Flournoy said. “Now we need to figure out how to translate these lessons to Taiwan.
The PLA was already exploring how to use drones to help lower-level units assess the battlefield more accurately, according to Decker Eveleth, a researcher at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, a Californian research group. Having seen the effectiveness of the Ukrainians in providing individual units with drones to identify and target threats, “that is a lesson that the PLA is interested in studying and utilising”, he said.
Yet perhaps the most important conclusion drawn in New Delhi is that it can no longer rely so heavily on Moscow for arms. Russia has had to dedicate production capacity to the war effort, causing supplies of spare parts to customers abroad to dry up. Much could change should Russia learn from mistakes and deploy its air force more effectively. “We just have to be really careful about the lessons we learn from this,” said Massicot.Defence minister Mariusz Błaszczak said in 2022 that Poland would create two new army divisions to boost defences in central and eastern Poland, a project requiring about 20,000 new troops.