Ukrainian intelligence officials say President Zelenskyy's military has destroyed Russia's 'Triuf' air defence system in what is reportedly the second strike on occupied Crimea in recent days.

If the anonymous voices quoted by U.S. news outlets in recent months are any indication, many Western military experts think that they know how to fight Ukraine’s war better than the Ukrainians do. American officials, NBC News reported last month, have “privately expressed disappointment” about how Ukraine had deployed its soldiers and believe that Kyiv’s forces “have not necessarily applied the training principles they received” from NATO militaries. Yet despite such scolding, the Ukrainians keep conducting their war their way. Despite exhortations to gather more forces in the south and try to cut through Russian lines, even if that means exposing more soldiers to enemy air attacks, Ukrainian forces—stymied by minefields—have proceeded more cautiously, conserving personnel in what could be a protracted conflict with a far more populous nation. They have opted instead to attack, using homegrown weapons systems as well as those provided by allies, Russian supply chains and command-and-control facilities deep behind the front line while also focusing on destroying artillery closer to the fighting.

Ukrainian commanders believe they understand the fundamental dynamics of the conflict far more clearly than those who have never encountered such conditions. Indeed, the longer this war goes on, the more clear it becomes that the Ukrainians have something to teach others, including the United States, about how to run military operations in the modern era.

In two recent speeches, Kathleen Hicks, the U.S. deputy secretary of defense, openly outlined how the United States might defend itself in a war with China, and the vision she described would sound familiar to Ukrainian military planners. Instead of directly butting heads with the People’s Liberation Army in a war of mass versus mass, Hicks spoke of achieving victory through ingenuity and innovation, yielding new military technologies that would be “harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat.”

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Stop micromanaging the war in Ukraine]

A Pentagon plan that she described as the Replicator Initiative would produce an army of small, inexpensive, AI-enabled vehicles capable of operating in a broad range of war-fighting environments. These vehicles—Hicks described them as “all-domain attributable autonomous,” or ADA2—would protect American fighters and enhance their capabilities. If the U.S. deployed them in large numbers, these ADA2 vehicles could be unstoppable; the PLA’s tanks, missiles, ships, and other heavy military equipment would have no way to fight them all off. A major advantage of the Replicator Initiative would be that fewer American soldiers would have to be put in harm’s way against a much larger Chinese army.

Hicks was painting a tantalizing picture, in short, of the U.S. playing to its strengths and mitigating its weaknesses. In describing all this, she referred numerous times to the current war in Ukraine and to the experience that the Ukrainian army is gaining. “Imagine flocks of ADA2 systems, flying at all sorts of altitudes, doing a range of missions, building on what we’ve seen in Ukraine,” she said. “They could be deployed by larger aircraft, launched by troops on land or sea, or take off themselves.” Hicks explicitly cited Ukraine’s fight against Russia as a precedent for a U.S. conflict with the more populous People’s Republic of China. “Replicator is meant to help us overcome the PRC’s biggest advantage, which is mass,” she said. “More ships. More missiles. More people. Before Russia invaded Ukraine again in February [2022], they seemed to have that advantage.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s creative use of military technologies has clearly had a major impact on Pentagon thinking. Taking advantage of a society that is freer, more flexible, and more open to grassroots initiative than Russia, the Ukrainians have started to develop large numbers of homegrown military systems, including simple, cheap aerial drones that can play many military roles, such as gathering intelligence over the battlefield and carrying out bombing attacks deep into Russia. Ukraine has also exploited technologies developed elsewhere. The country’s deployment of Starlink internet service, U.S.-made Switchblade drones, and commercially available image-gathering equipment shows how emerging technology “can be decisive in defending against modern military aggression,” Hicks observed. Skillful procurement offers a major battlefield advantage.  

The war in Ukraine has substantially reinforced some things that the Pentagon already knew—including the long-standing American assumption that, if one side cannot gain control of the air over the area of fighting, moving heavy, expensive equipment forward will be extremely difficult. Russia’s slow-motion offensive in Bakhmut earlier this year and the current Ukrainian counteroffensive have both demonstrated this. Ukraine is trying to compensate by using a lot of drones. But progress has been difficult.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

The Pentagon’s interest in the Replicator Initiative may indicate some doubts—as American military planners reflect on Ukraine’s experience and try to extrapolate from it about a war against China—about whether the U.S. can reliably maintain air supremacy over a large area of fighting for a long period of time. The initiative is a plan for destroying enemy forces and denying them control over an area, rather than for, say, the rapid, armored advances that have been a staple of American combined-arms warfare since World War II. Preserving air supremacy may remain the goal of U.S. strategic policy, but that may not be achievable in reality—especially against China, given all of that country’s resources. The U.S. must plan accordingly.

Although Ukraine’s successful drone attacks hint at the potential benefits of artificially intelligent drones that can inflict damage without putting soldiers at risk, recent events have also underscored the importance of many of the traditional elements of industrial war. The Ukrainians have benefited by attacking Russia’s supply logistics and from the range, accuracy, and firing speed of Western-supplied heavy artillery. At first, the Ukrainians needed time to adjust to the demands of large-scale war. They needed—and still need—mass infusions of outside aid to keep fighting efficiently. Still, the Ukrainians have improved. They have started making more of their own heavy artillery shells. They are broadening their capabilities by using more off-the-shelf products to reduce both development and production costs.  

Critics can quibble, of course, with Ukrainian commanders’ decisions about when and how to go about recovering territory occupied by Russian invaders. But for all the anonymous sniping about how Ukraine should fight like NATO, the reality is that other countries, including the superpower United States, have a great deal to learn about war from Ukraine.

What is a “hold” in the Senate? This is not a question that many casual observers of American politics would normally ask. But Tommy Tuberville, the senator from Alabama, has made it a more urgent one with his blanket hold on all key military promotions that have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Tuberville’s action, now in its seventh month, has kept hundreds of military leaders, including top officials, in limbo, doing real harm to the nation’s armed forces.

As Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro told CNN, Tuberville is “playing Russian roulette with the very lives of our service members by denying them the opportunity to actually have the most experienced combat leaders in those positions to lead them in times of peace and in times of combat.” The three top service secretaries wrote jointly in The Washington Post earlier this month, decrying what Tuberville is doing.

No specific rule created the Senate-hold procedure; it is a custom, but one that flowed from the rules of a legislative body that values consensus and has enacted that value by requiring unanimous consent to do much, indeed most, of its business. Formally, a hold occurs when a senator writes a letter to the leaders in the body indicating that he or she will deny unanimous consent to moving to a vote on a nominee. Without unanimous consent, the only effective way to get to a vote is for another senator to file a cloture petition, meaning a separate vote to move to act on the nomination. For confirmations, that now takes only a majority of votes (legislation takes a supermajority of 60 out of 100 senators), but it is still a time-consuming process. After the petition is filed, it must be held over for two legislative days, with more parliamentary maneuvering before a cloture vote takes place and then, if that’s successful, hours of guaranteed debate after. With what could be 650 military promotions, each needing individual actions without unanimous consent to bundle them, and with Senate-floor time a precious commodity, this is not feasible. Promotions at the officer level or above require Senate confirmation. This has never been controversial. But what was routinely done without any fanfare—military promotions, confirmed by voice vote, often en bloc, with unanimous consent—is no more.

Tuberville, a former college-football coach and someone who has never served in the military, is taking this step to force the Pentagon to eliminate a policy that enables active service members on military installations in states that ban abortions to travel to another state to obtain such a procedure; service members pay for the abortion itself, but not the travel costs. He is oblivious to the damage to the military and national security, and has faced criticism even from many members of his own party, including his leader Mitch McConnell.

In theory, if McConnell or the Senate Republicans really wanted to stop this insanity, they could do it any time that Tuberville is not on the Senate floor, if the Senate majority leader asked for unanimous consent and no other senator objected. But in reality, someone would object: When the Senate is in session, each party always has at least one member on the floor to prevent mischief from the other. That means denying unanimous consent if the other party wants to jam something through. The standard practice has been that members of your party respect the hold prerogative and deny unanimous consent, even if the person who placed the hold is nowhere to be found. Any move by Chuck Schumer to act on these promotions is denied a chance at unanimous consent by whatever Republican senator is on the floor at the time.

The Senate’s deep and dirty secret is that holds work only because every member of the Senate wants them to. Other senators continue to deny unanimous consent not just to protect the prerogatives of their absent colleague, but to protect their own ability to use holds in the future. Every member of the body is culpable, because every one of them wants to have the opportunity to gain leverage over a president or another executive-branch official or agency. Even senators of the same party as the president find many instances where their pleas for attention or action are ignored or downplayed. Using a hold to block confirmation of someone a president dearly wants in office means that attention will be given. Of course, in most cases, the holds are for individuals and do not last very long.

Holds have been a part of Senate procedure for a long time, but their use for punitive or ideological motives is relatively recent. During the Obama administration, Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas put a hold on Barack Obama’s nominee for ambassador to the Bahamas, Cassandra Butts, that lasted for 27 months, until she died of cancer. The hold had nothing to do with Butts’s qualifications or character—it was purely punitive. Tuberville is not the only senator now using blanket holds for partisan or ideological purposes; Kentucky’s Rand Paul has a blanket hold on more than 60 ambassadors and other key State Department officials, and Ohio’s J. D. Vance has done the same for Justice Department nominees, including the head of the Office on Violence Against Women and several nominees for U.S. attorney, in retaliation for DOJ actions against Donald Trump.

For a long time, holds were an allowable and sometimes beneficial practice that helped balance power between the Senate and the presidency. Senators rarely took advantage of the process by applying blanket holds or sustaining them for unreasonable periods of time. The main abuses in the past were when individual senators tried to keep their holds secret to avoid criticism. That practice was severely limited a few years ago. But the norms that kept the practice in check have been shredded.

What to do? Two simple rule changes could break the impasse. First, by majority, the Senate could require an up-or-down floor vote on a confirmation within 30 days after the nominee has been reported out by the relevant committee. An alternative would be for the Senate to create by rule its own variation of the House’s discharge petition: If a majority of senators sign such a petition, it would force a floor vote under a privileged resolution.

The Senate should go further yet to facilitate confirmations of judges and executive officials. It should allow multiple confirmations to occur en bloc, and move on from the practice of individual votes, which can involve several steps that use precious floor time. And it should significantly reduce the number of positions that require Senate confirmation. The old Senate is no more. In the new, tribalized Senate with too many obdurate and radical members willing to damage governance and national security without regard for the consequences, better rules are the only way to avoid these abuses.

The government has warned people in eight villages to take cover in the shelters if they hear an air raid alert.

The pilot fired two missiles - the first missed rather than malfunctioned, as was claimed at the time.