Many in the United States seem to have a degree of optimism that owes more to the past than the present. Earlier in the war, Ukraine was able to take advantage of Russian massive miscalculation in assuming it could repeat its experience in seizing Crimea in 2014 and virtually drive in and take control of the country. Russia was unprepared for serious Ukrainian resistance, failed to understand how limited the success of its effort at modernization of its forces and command and control structure had been, and was not ready at any level to fight a serious war.

Ukraine first successfully held in the face of the original Russian offensive and then sent in effective military forces that could push back Russian forces that were never properly organized for sustained combat, had no recent warfighting experience, and were not prepared to resist. Ukraine scored major gains, and if it had been properly equipped for sustained offensive action during the period in which Russian was being forced to retreat, it might have driven Russia out of far more territory and made some form of a major victory a far more realistic probability.

No one can totally dismiss the possibility that Ukraine can still do this. Putin’s problems with Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group highlight his political challenges. Russia remains largely on the defensive and the lack of any clear Russian path to a shift to the offensive all illustrate Russia’s limits. War is not predictable, and a real, sustainable Ukrainian breakthrough might occur. Russia might be driven into a sustained retreat, and Putin might lose power or must negotiate a peace that Ukraine would willingly accept.

The most probable outcome, however, is a war of attrition that has no clear outcome or time limit. It is a war where both sides fight a long series of relatively static battles with high levels of attrition while they increasingly dig in along the entire front, using drones and missiles to attack each other. Defense in depth will be fought with light precision guided weapons that limit efforts to create and sustain major armored breakthroughs. Missiles will not fully counter trenches, and mines and artillery will halt smaller breakthroughs. It is a war that may come grimly close to a modernized version of World War I or Stalingrad.

This makes the current U.S. effort to push Ukraine into new offensives potentially dangerous. If anything, such offensives may lead to higher Ukrainian casualties and consume both its newly trained troops and more advanced supplies of weapons. Taking the offensive in wars of attrition almost always produces initially high casualties unless decisive damage is done to the defender before the attacker strikes. The United States and its allies avoided such losses in attacking Saddam Hussein in 1991 by launching a massive air campaign to weaken Iraq’s land defenses before the land campaign began. However, but Ukraine has no option of this kind and is already suffering major losses of its more advanced weapons and high casualties.

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