The timing and synchronization of military operations, when factoring in the environmental conditions of the battlefield, creates windows of opportunity to escape surveillance. While seizing these windows of opportunity may not immediately lead to decisive outcomes, it can help set the conditions for future larger-scale assaults and ultimately contribute to breaking the deadlock. To say that larger-scale attacks are a thing of the past and that the deadlock will define future warfighting in Ukraine—and perhaps elsewhere—is certainly premature.

Beyond daylight, terrain, and weather, there are other factors that make the battlefield in Ukraine less transparent than some commentators think. These include the use of jammers and other electronic warfare technologies that block or reduce the other side’s ability to detect soldiers and vehicles. Right now, Ukraine and Russia are waging an ongoing technological adaptation battle. Both sides increasingly rely on small jammers installed on vehicles or next to trench lines to create protective umbrellas over their positions, which may cause attacking FPV drones to deviate from their course and crash.

There are various ways to reduce or even deny the enemy the ability to conduct real-time tracking. To stay hidden as long as possible from the enemy eyes puts a focus on dispersal and concealment—which often means going underground to evade visual observation, a tactic that Hamas has mastered to perfection in the Gaza Strip. But staying hidden also has to do with simple environmental factors that have influenced success and failure on the battlefield throughout military history, such as terrain, time of day, and weather conditions. Indeed, a major takeaway from my last trip is that the pervasive presence of new technologies on the battlefield makes individual soldierly virtues—intense discipline, synchronization, physical fitness, and a deep understanding of the terrain and environment—even more important than in the past. To take a first example: On a more transparent battlefield, the time of day one chooses to attack has become critical again. Most Ukrainian attacks occur pre-dawn or late in the evening, under the cover of darkness. The reason is simple. Without sufficient light, it is much more difficult for Russian drone operators to spot attackers. Although drones with infrared cameras can see in the dark and are widely used, they are costlier than ordinary drones—and therefore far fewer in number than simple daytime drones, creating gaps in coverage along the front that can be exploited.

The transparent battlefield has significantly shrunk the window of opportunity for such attacks to succeed, but it has not closed the window entirely.

The advent of pervasive surveillance, these observers argue, has created a newly transparent battlefield. Ubiquitous drones and other technologies make it possible to track, in real time, any troop movements by either side, making it all but impossible to hide massing forces and concentrations of armored vehicles from the enemy. That same surveillance then makes sure that forces, once detected, are immediately hit by barrages of artillery rounds, missiles, and suicide drones. Sustaining any attempt at a breakthrough has become a most difficult proposition.

How an Army of Drones Changed the Battlefield in Ukraine

Then in mid-October, the Russians tried just that in a fierce assault on the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka, which sits in a geographically strategic pocket close to the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk. Now it was the Russians on the offensive, with four brigades moving in columns of tanks and personnel carriers, and descending on one narrow strip of the front.Engineering vehicles with mine sweepers led the charge. It was exactly how the Ukrainians had started their counteroffensive. And similarly, the Russians suffered severe losses — Ukrainian officials claimed that more than 4,000 Russian troops were killed in the first three weeks of the assault — before switching to a dismounted approach, just as the Ukrainians had done.

Zaluzhny told his troops to pause their assaults before any more of Ukraine’s limited weaponry was obliterated, a senior Ukrainian military official said.Rather than try to breach Russian defenses with a massed, mechanized attack and supporting artillery fire, as his American counterparts had advised, Zaluzhny decided that Ukrainian soldiers would go on foot in small groups of about 10 — a process that would save equipment and lives but would be much slower.Months of planning with the United States was tossed aside on that fourth day, and the already delayed counteroffensive, designed to reach the Sea of Azov within two to three months, ground to a near-halt. Rather than making a nine-mile breakthrough on their first day, the Ukrainians in the nearly six months since June have advanced about 12 miles and liberated a handful of villages. Melitopol is still far out of reach.

Promised equipment was delivered late or arrived unfit for combat, the Ukrainians said. “A lot of weapons that are coming in now, they were relevant last year,” the senior Ukrainian military official said, not for the high-tech battles ahead. Crucially, he said, they had received only 15 percent of items — like the Mine Clearing Line Charge launchers (MCLCs) — needed to execute their plan to remotely cut passages through the minefields.

Can Ukraine win?

While U.S. production was increasing, it was barely more than a tenth of that.

The planning called for wider and better Western training, which up to that point had focused on teaching small groups and individuals to use Western-provided weapons. Thousands of troops would be instructed in Germany in large unit formations and U.S.-style battlefield maneuvers, whose principles dated to World War II. For American troops, training in what was known as “combined arms” operations often lasted more than a year. The Ukraine plan proposed condensing that into a few months.

On that, a senior Ukrainian military official agreed. War-gaming “doesn’t work,” the official said in retrospect, in part because of the new technology that was transforming the battlefield. Ukrainian soldiers were fighting a war unlike anything NATO forces had experienced: a large conventional conflict, with World World I-style trenches overlaid by omnipresent drones and other futuristic tools — and without the air superiority the U.S. military has had in every modern conflict it has fought.

But Western officials said the war games affirmed their assessment that Ukraine would be best served by concentrating its forces on a single strategic objective — a massed attack through Russian-held areas to the Sea of Azov, severing the Kremlin’s land route from Russia to Crimea, a critical supply line.

The campaign’s inconclusive and discouraging early months pose sobering questions for Kyiv’s Western backers about the future, as Zelensky — supported by an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians — vows to fight until Ukraine restores the borders established in its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union.“That’s going to take years and a lot of blood,” a British security official said, if it’s even possible. “Is Ukraine up for that? What are the manpower implications? The economic implications? Implications for Western support?”

● As the expected launch of the offensive approached, Ukrainian military officials feared they would suffer catastrophic losses — while American officials believed the toll would ultimately be higher without a decisive assault.

● U.S. military officials were confident that a mechanized frontal attack on Russian lines was feasible with the troops and weapons that Ukraine had. The simulations concluded that Kyiv’s forces, in the best case, could reach the Sea of Azov and cut off Russian troops in the south in 60 to 90 days.

U.S. and Ukrainian officials sharply disagreed at times over strategy, tactics and timing. The Pentagon wanted the assault to begin in mid-April to prevent Russia from continuing to strengthen its lines. The Ukrainians hesitated, insisting they weren’t ready without additional weapons and training.

Ukrainian, U.S. and British military officers held eight major tabletop war games to build a campaign plan. But Washington miscalculated the extent to which Ukraine’s forces could be transformed into a Western-style fighting force in a short period — especially without giving Kyiv air power integral to modern militaries.

Austin, in his deliberate baritone, asked Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov about Ukraine’s decision-making in the opening days of its long-awaited counteroffensive, pressing him on why his forces weren’t using Western-supplied mine-clearing equipment to enable a larger, mechanized assault, or using smoke to conceal their advances. Despite Russia’s thick defensive lines, Austin said, the Kremlin’s troops weren’t invincible.

Miscalculations, divisions marked offensive planning by U.S., Ukraine

When I raised these claims with a senior military officer, he said that some commanders have little choice in second-guessing orders from the top. At one point in early October, he said, the political leadership in Kyiv demanded an operation to “retake” the city of Horlivka, a strategic outpost in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have held and fiercely defended for nearly a decade. The answer came back in the form of a question: With what? “They don’t have the men or the weapons,” says the officer. “Where are the weapons? Where is the artillery? Where are the new recruits?”