Benjamin Jensen and Jose M. Macias III
For over a century, military professionals have treated operational fires as the backbone of modern campaigns—shaping the battlefield, degrading enemy formations, and setting the conditions for maneuver. But what happens when that logic breaks down? What if long-range strikes become less about shaping operations and more about shaping narratives—used not to support a ground advance but to terrorize civilians and coerce political outcomes?
That is the story emerging from Russia’s war in Ukraine. Despite inheriting a military doctrine steeped in deep battle, reconnaissance-strike complexes, and precision noncontact warfare, Russia has consistently failed to employ operational fires in a way that reflects this legacy. Instead, firepower has become unmoored from maneuver. Russian missile salvos and loitering drone attacks increasingly appear to serve a punitive, strategic coercion logic rather than a campaign to dislocate Ukrainian defenses or synchronize effects across domains. Chaos reigns along an extended front line defined by human wave attacks, thousands of small first-person view (FPV) drones, and artillery fire vectored by strike and reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
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