It comes on the eve of National Day, held in Tiananmen Square, which marks the 74th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Authorities of the self-styled Republic of Artsakh order the dismantling of all of its state institutions.

Ant Group, owner of Alipay, the world’s largest digital payment platform, is expanding its global network to include 10 major e-wallets from across Asia. That marks a significant step toward making travel and spending in the People’s Republic of China easier for foreigners.

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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.

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