Ukraine’s war against Russia has forced a thorough rethink of how modern armies fight. The resulting concept, if it takes full doctrinal shape, could shape Western land doctrine for the next decade, a says a new paper from the UK’s Royal United Services Institute, Emergent Approaches to Combined Arms Manoeuvre in Ukraine by Jack Watling.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, many analysts assumed the campaign would resemble previous post-Cold-War conflicts: large armoured columns, massed fires and a decisive airborne edge for whichever side could dominate the skies.
Instead, both armies found themselves under a digital microscope, the RUSI report finds. Commercial satellite firms supplied near-real-time imagery. Cheap Chinese quadcopters hovered incessantly over trench lines. Smartphone apps delivered live telemetry to gunners on both sides. By late 2023, the front was so ‘transparent‘, in the word used repeatedly by Ukrainian officers interviewed for the study, that almost any troop concentration larger than a platoon was swiftly spotted and shelled.
A transparent battlefield
That transparency rendered classic manoeuvre theory—emphasising shock, surprise and rapid exploitation—obsolete. To mass forces was to invite annihilation; hiding them was nearly impossible. To surge past an initial breakthrough proved even harder: Russian Lancet loitering munitions scythed down columns of mine-clearing tanks and bridgelayers; Iranian-supplied Shahed drones harried supply trucks kilometres behind the line.
The 2023 Ukrainian counter-offensive, waged in Zaporizhia under these conditions, stalled after only modest territorial gains. By spring 2024 senior officers in Kyiv conceded they needed a new way to fight.
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Russia, for its part, adapted quickly in some areas. As the RUSI paper notes, electronic-warfare teams mounted on armoured trucks now roam behind the Russian front, scanning for Ukrainian drone transmissions. Once they fix on a signal, artillery or Lancet strike drones pummel the likely location. Small infiltration squads, wrapped in thermal-reflective sheets, crawl to within hand-grenade range of Ukrainian trenches at night, sowing panic and disrupting ammunition runs.
Russian adaptations
Moscow’s command-and-control has also improved: units reserve bandwidth on Starlink-like terminals purchased via intermediaries, making Russian firing loops nearly as quick as Ukraine’s famed tablet-based Nettle system.
Yet these improvements mask enduring deficiencies. Russian brigade commanders seldom prioritise infantry training; defensive positions often consist of little more than mud bunkers reinforced with plywood. Casualty replacement relies on convicts and pressed conscripts who cycle through the front before learning basic fieldcraft.
The Russian army remains systemically inefficient. — Jack Watling, Royal United Servies Institute
According to the RUSI researchers, Russian staffs have become adept at degrading Ukrainian drone coverage—but still struggle to exploit the holes they create. The Russian army “remains systemically inefficient,” Mr Watling writes, wasting manpower in costly frontal probes that rarely translate into operational encirclements.
Ukraine’s seven-phase solution
Necessity being the mother of invention, a handful of Ukrainian brigades—often the better-equipped, NATO-trained formations—started experimenting in late 2024 with a phased attack scheme. By summer 2025 the model had cohered into a seven-step choreography:
- Survey. Weeks before a planned assault, reconnaissance drones map every artillery pit, EW emitter and supply road in the intended sector. This intelligence campaign starts only after a ‘counter-reconnaissance battle‘ against Russian drones, ensuring Ukrainian quadcopters can loiter unmolested.
- Isolate. Once the support grid is charted, Ukrainian operators strike it with what the report calls ‘middle-strike‘ fires: glide bombs dropped by fixed-wing UAVs, laser-guided Excalibur rounds and mines parachuted onto crossroads. The aim is not to obliterate the enemy brigade but to sever its arteries—fuel, ammunition and fresh troops.
- Degrade. After isolation comes targeted attrition inside the pocket. First-person-view (FPV) drones dive into dugouts or antenna arrays revealed during the survey phase. Small artillery teams, firing from woods by night and dispersing at dawn, chip away at command bunkers and ammo sheds.
- Fix. To prevent Russian units from rotating out or re-arming under cover of darkness, Ukrainian drone pilots keep a constant ‘presence orbit‘ above the sector. Any detected movement draws immediate FPV or mortar fire, freezing the defenders in place.
- Suppress. Under cover of electronic jamming, Ukrainian rocket artillery saturates a narrow frontage. Uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs) trundle forward to deliver belt-fed machine-gun fire and smoke grenades, all controlled from tablets kilometres away. The goal is to stun Russian platoons, forcing them into bunkers and reducing their ability to man anti-tank guided-missile (ATGM) posts.
- Close and destroy. Only now do tanks and infantry fighting vehicles roll forward, often no more than a dozen hulls wide. Armour draws the inevitable ATGM shots; protected troop carriers disgorge assault squads armed with grenade launchers and flame-thrower rockets. Ukrainian soldiers clear one trench at a time, marking secure sections with orange smoke.
- Consolidate. Fresh territorial-defence troops replace the assault companies, digging new foxholes and wiring up sensors snatched from the Russians. Drone launch pads shift forward to cover the next kilometre of enemy lines. The battered Ukrainian spearhead withdraws for rest, repair and retraining.
The report cautions that no Ukrainian brigade has yet executed all seven phases perfectly in one sequence. But those attempting something close—such as the 47th ‘Magura‘ Mechanised Brigade south of Bakhmut—have scored notable gains. In April 2025 Magura battlegroups advanced nearly three kilometres along the Siverskyi Donets canal with fewer than 30 casualties, an outcome considered miraculous given the lethality of the modern front.
Tools of the new trade
Central to the concept is an unglamorous appreciation for logistics. Assault units carry only a day’s worth of ammunition, so UGV resupply trains creep behind them on pre-plotted routes, sometimes guided by AI path-finding software. Drones drop medical plasma and surgical tools into shell-holes where combat medics stabilise wounded soldiers before a UGV ambulance spirits them to a field hospital. Failure in any one leg—EW jamming, drone reconnaissance, vehicle recovery—can unravel the entire sequence.
The arsenal employed is varied. Reconnaissance quadcopters costing $1,500 each supply 4K video to every company command post. Larger bomber drones shaped like model airplanes deliver antiquated 82-millimetre mortar rounds fitted with 3D-printed tails. Howitzers—especially the reliable, if geriatric, Soviet D-20—fire smoke and high-explosive shells from hidden copses. The prized Western M777 155-millimetre guns are reserved for counter-battery duels and the occasional Excalibur precision strike. Tanks, though no longer fielded en masse, are cherished for their ability to blast concrete pillboxes at point-blank range. Infantry ride in everything from Swedish CV90s to hastily welded ‘Franken-APCs” built on Ford F-550 truck frames.
Electronic warfare is the invisible glue. Portable jammers mounted on pickup trucks spoof GPS receivers on Russian drones, forcing them to crash or drift aimlessly. Conversely, Ukrainian EW units exploit gaps in Russian coverage: when Russian troops turn up their jammers to block FPV drones, they also blind their own quadcopters, granting Ukraine a brief window of aerial superiority. Commanders choreograph each phase around these oscillating electronic bubbles.
How Russia might counter
The potency of Ukraine’s phased approach rests on continued Western supply of precision munitions and high-performance drones. Should those pipelines falter, the plan could fray. Russia is experimenting with its own solutions: Lancet-style suicide drones modified to home on radio-frequency emissions and cheap plastic decoys stuffed with heat packs to lure Ukrainian FPVs.
The Kremlin has also contracted Iranian engineers to accelerate production of Shahed-238 stealth drones. These might slip through Ukrainian air defences and strike the UGV resupply convoys that underpin each assault.
Moreover, Russia’s vast manpower pool could blunt the attritional benefits of isolation. If Moscow simply pours fresh battalions into a sector faster than Ukraine can crater roads and sow mines, the calculus changes. A senior Ukrainian general quoted in the RUSI paper acknowledges the risk: “We can kill a thousand Russians to take one village, but if they can replace them in a week, have we won?”
Implications for NATO armies
For NATO planners the Ukrainian experiment carries three big lessons, according to the RUSI authors. First, battlefield geometry must be redrawn. The old division of labour ‘close‘, ‘deep‘ and ‘rear‘—assumes a modicum of depth behind the line. But a 40-kilometre-range FPV drone renders much of what once counted as the rear as lethal as the forward trench. Western doctrine writers may need to think in terms of ‘contact bubbles” that roam with each battlegroup, rather than fixed echelons.
We can kill a thousand Russians to take one village, but if they can replace them in a week, have we won? — a Ukrainian general for the RUSI report
Second, repairability trumps armour thickness. Ukraine’s tank crews prize the British-supplied Challenger 2 for its survivability, but its bespoke modules and limited spare parts mean a mobility kill often becomes a write-off. By contrast, Soviet-era T-72s can be field-repaired with welding gear and scavenged tracks. Future Western armoured-vehicle programmes, the report suggests, should prioritise modularity and field reparability over marginal improvements in active-protection systems.
Third, artillery logistics must catch up with consumption rates unseen since 1945. During the height of the 2023 offensive, Ukraine fired 7,000 shells per day; Russia fired three times that. Even after a year of industrial ramp-up, NATO stockpiles would struggle to sustain such expenditure for more than a fortnight. To close that gap, RUSI recommends doubling Western shell output and investing in cheap glide kits that convert unguided bombs into stand-off munitions, thereby spreading demand across multiple supply chains.
Recommendations for Kyiv
The paper ends with concrete advice. Kyiv should enlarge its recruit intake—shy of Russia’s but large enough to rotate exhausted brigades. It should institutionalise the seven-phase model by creating combined-arms training centres, where drone pilots, EW specialists, gunners and infantry rehearse each phase in simulators before attempting it in live-fire ranges.
Conversely, NATO donors should stop hunting for a silver bullet, the authors argue, and instead supply depth: more 122-millimetre howitzer shells for Soviet tubes still in service, more batteries of Starlink terminals, more Toyota Hilux trucks that can be armoured in Kyiv workshops.
The report urges a ‘brigade-company partnership” scheme, pairing Ukrainian manoeuvre units with Western firms eager to test prototypes under real combat conditions: ground-launched loitering munitions, miniature radar pods, AI-assisted target-recognition software. This feedback loop has already yielded successes: American engineers, alerted by Ukrainian complaints that FPV drones lost video at 1.5 kilometres, rewrote firmware to auto-switch frequencies when jamming is detected.
A glimpse of future war
Whether Ukraine’s phased attack system heralds a revolution in military affairs remains to be seen. Similar claims were made about network-centric warfare in Iraq and counter-insurgency in Afghanistan—concepts that dazzled at first but ultimately failed to produce decisive political victory. Still, the brutal laboratory of the Donbas has delivered at least one incontrovertible conclusion: in a world where every soldier is a sensor and every phone can guide a rocket, the margin for doctrinal complacency has vanished.
For now, Kyiv will keep refining its seven-step dance, Moscow will keep probing for weaknesses and NATO officers will study every drone feed they can lay hands on. The next war, be it in the Baltics or the South China Sea, will not look exactly like Ukraine’s. But the silhouette is becoming clear: dispersed units, ubiquitous drones, precision fires and a premium on logistics agility.
As stated in the RUSI report, mastering that pattern is a valuable starting point for the modernisation of European land power. Europe may have no choice but to learn fast.
