Joshua Ratta
In June 2023, days into a major counteroffensive in the Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukrainian forces attacking along a supporting axis faced the task of seizing the village of Novodarivka from Russian occupying forces. Although it was an otherwise unremarkable village, the way in which Ukraine succeeded in the battle is anything but. Ukrainian forces’ decision to discard the initial high-tempo, armor-centric concept of operations they brought to Novodarivka in favor of a slow and methodical dismounted infantry–centric approach reveals much about armor’s limitations on the modern battlefield. Yet it also yields clues about how to overcome those limitations, recapturing the advantages of combined arms teams facing prepared defenses.
The Challenge for Armor: US Army Experimentation
At the same time as the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ transition to an infantry-centric concept of operations was causing controversy among Ukraine’s international partners, some one thousand miles to the north, a similar transition was quietly occurring. A US Army battalion task force, TF Mustang—1-8th Cavalry, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division—in Finland for a series of multinational exercises, quickly realized that attempting to dislodge a defending Finnish mechanized battlegroup tied into Finland’s natural canalizing forests and swamps through mounted maneuver was a losing proposition. Instead, the task force switched to a tactical paradigm of dismounted infantry, scouts, and engineers pulling their accompanying armored formations forward whenever encountering natural or man-made restricted terrain. It was, in effect, a rediscovery of the forgotten defile drill. As two of TF Mustang’s armor officers would note on their experience “Armor [may be] the combat arm of decision, but it still needs the infantry to set conditions and lead the way!”
But while both TF Mustang during exercises in Finland and Ukrainian forces at Novodarivka adopted to lead with infantry, it is not the only proposed solution to overcome tanks’ inherent limitations on the battlefield. Earlier this year, Colonel Bryan Bonnema and Lieutenant Colonel Moises Jimenez undertook a broad observation of changing battlefield conditions in Ukraine and reached a very different conclusion, which they presented in the pages of the Modern War Institute. They proposed that armored brigade combat teams (ABCTs) shift from confronting a prepared defense through an approach based on suppressing, breaching, and seizing to one of isolating, suppressing, and destroying.
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