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Making Sense of The Après-Ukraine.

What it might mean and what it might not mean.

Aurelien, Dec 11, 2025

“…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Because I’m not a military specialist, I’m going to skip over very technical questions, where there is anyway a great deal of disagreement. Moreover, the way in which these questions are posed is often not very helpful, and frequently involves weapons fetishists flourishing performance statistics at each other. In the end, whether the planned FX69 or the planned Su141 is a “better” fighter isn’t really the point, unless you take the overall scenario into account. If dogfights (albeit at very long range) will be a feature of future conflicts, and these planned aircraft are involved, then performance characteristics have their place. But we know, for example, that Russian doctrine for air superiority relies very largely on missiles and, even if the FX69 were in some senses “better” when it arrived in service, it might not get near enough to Russian aircraft for that superiority to be useful. The real lessons of crises and conflicts are always at a more general level.

………………………………. let’s turn to Ukraine, repeating the very important provisos that “lessons” are only of value if we can expect future conflicts with at least some of the same features, and if the “lessons” are likely to be reasonably enduring, given the huge cost and time involved in developing and adapting military equipment.

………………….So far as the first is concerned, we have to remember that Ukraine is a very specific type of conflict. 

 It’s being fought between two advanced technology nations with indigenous defence industries, whose equipment is similar, and in some cases identical, and largely from the same technological tradition.

It’s being fought between countries with a shared military tradition, and a capacity for large-scale land/air operations, (less influenced by the West in the case of Ukraine than is sometimes thought) and between countries where patriotism and a willingness to fight for one’s country are still political forces. 

And finally it’s being fought between the largest country in the world, mainly self-sufficient economically, and with the tacit acquiescence of China, and a smaller country backed financially and militarily by the entire western world.

So obviously the chances of exactly the same situation developing elsewhere are zero. The question, as always, is how far, if at all, the particularities of the Ukraine conflict are applicable to potential conflicts elsewhere. 

 The first question is obviously whether we are going to see any more heavy-metal conflicts of this kind anywhere the world. There are a number of nuances hidden in that question: the war in Ukraine has gone on as long as it has because the two sides are capable of raising and training large armies (Ukraine with more difficulty, certainly) and supplying and equipping them from stocks and new production (transferred in the case of Ukraine.) This means that very large forces can fight each other continuously for years, and, in the Russian case, more than replace losses of personnel and material.

Now the obvious place for such a future war is Europe against NATO forces, but it’s doubtful whether the scenario is very likely. As I’ll explain in a minute, it’s very hard to imagine NATO forces reconfiguring themselves to absorb the lessons of Ukraine, and in any event it’s not necessary for the Russians to attack NATO nations with ground forces. They can destroy NATO forces from a safe distance with missiles and drones. Moreover, NATO forces are small, and are unlikely to get much bigger, and their stocks of ammunition and logistics will be exhausted in a matter of days. (Unlike Russia, and in spite of planned increases in stocks, NATO nations cannot replace their losses and consumption in real time, as Russia can.) So a direct military clash would be, as they say, nasty brutish and short, even if NATO “learned the lessons” of Ukraine

It’s hard to imagine any wars of similar scale and intensity elsewhere in the world. One possibility is a ground war involving the two Koreas, where the level of technology, even on the Northern side, is generally high, although the terrain is very different. Moreover, whilst border clashes here and there in the world are obviously possible (India and Pakistan or China are illustrative examples) it’s hard to imagine a full-scale war of the type we are now seeing. 

……………….. one thing that the Ukraine experience has demonstrated is the importance of these boring, mundane things like logistic support, resupply and sheer numbers of weapons………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

It’s worth pointing out that drones did not feature much at the beginning of the conflict, but have now become a significant factor. (This is especially true for Ukraine, which would be in a much worse state without them.)

“drone” (Unmanned Air Vehicle until recently) is a very generic term. It’s clear, for example, that Russian drones that fly beyond Kiev are effectively pilotless aircraft, with significant destructive capability. At the other extreme, footage of a lot of Ukrainian drone attacks shows small, short-range craft dropping grenades onto small groups of soldiers. This leads us to one of the most important conclusions from the war so far: much depends on overall command and control and the ability to use capabilities together, as part of an overall plan.

……………………………………………………….In spite of the current excitement, it seems unlikely that the West will adopt drones in the way that the Russians and Ukrainians have. There are all sorts of reasons for this, but the principal one is that those two countries are fighting a war, and in wartime innovation tends to impose itself as a priority. Both sides, and especially the Russians, were caught unawares by the nature of the war as it developed in 2022, and as a consequence innovation has been very rapid in all areas. There is no chance of this happening in the West: the political urgency is not there.

………………………………….Effectively, either a NATO working group spends ten years trying to develop a concept, by which time the technology will have changed, or dozens of nations just decide to do their own thing……………………

…………………. Drone attacks on tanks are the latest iteration of a struggle between attack and defence which has been going on for fifty years and will no doubt evolve further. Defensive technologies are now being developed which may be able to disrupt and protect against drones to the point where so many would be needed to secure a kill that their use would be uneconomic. It would be unwise to write off the tank yet, and indeed unwise to jump to too many conclusions about drones.

……………………………………………………………………………………….. Finally, the technologies introduced in Ukraine, and those still being developed, will find uses that for the moment no-one can foresee, some good, some bad. (Organised crime may find drone technologies useful for transporting drugs, for example.) https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/making-sense-of-the-apres-ukraine?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=841976&post_id=181176162&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

December 11, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment