Protection Keeps Maneuver Fighting

Small Wars Journal | Michael Carvelli

Ukrainian military forces preserved critical command, supply, air defense, and maintenance systems across four years of sustained defense to prevent operational collapse. This systematic protection of supporting infrastructure allowed frontline combat units to maintain campaign endurance despite relentless Russian precision strikes and drone attacks. In contrast, the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict demonstrated the consequences of protection failures.

Azerbaijani forces integrated loitering munitions and precision artillery to rapidly degrade Armenian air defenses and command nodes within three weeks. This culminated in the capture of Shushi and severed the critical Lachin-Stepanakert Road sustainment route. Systemic survival requires dispersion, redundancy, and hardening across five critical systems: command, supply, air defense, maintenance, and casualty evacuation. To survive, Ukrainian forces dispersed command posts, utilized night movements, and deployed passive sensors. Conversely, Armenia's concentrated command infrastructure and vulnerable lines of communication allowed Azerbaijani forces to isolate frontline defenders. Tactical skill alone is insufficient. When supporting systems degrade without rapid reconstitution, operational collapse becomes inevitable.

Comment

The rapid collapse of Armenian defences in 2020 demonstrates a critical doctrinal implication regarding the vulnerability of concentrated logistics. When Azerbaijani forces targeted the Lachin-Stepanakert Road, they exposed the fatal risk of relying on a single, unhardened ground line of communication. In the Nagorno-Karabakh theatre, the absence of redundant supply routes meant that any disruption to this single artery immediately paralysed forward units. This vulnerability directly compromised Armenian tactical units fighting near Shushi, rendering their defensive proficiency obsolete once physical isolation occurred.

This systemic failure in Nagorno-Karabakh demonstrates how the degradation of one operational function rapidly cascades through adjacent systems. Azerbaijani integration of loitering munitions systematically dismantled Armenian air defence radars, which subsequently stripped protection from the Lachin-Stepanakert Road. Deprived of aerial cover, Armenian supply convoys and reinforcing brigades became highly visible targets before they could reach the Shushi defensive perimeter.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the interdiction of the Lachin-Stepanakert Road demonstrates the fragility of single ground lines of communication, how can modern land forces balance the heavy logistical footprint of armoured maneuver with the necessity of highly dispersed, low-signature sustainment?

The pattern of modern high-intensity conflict suggests that resolving this tension requires shifting from linear supply corridors to decentralized, autonomous distribution networks. My assessment is that land forces will increasingly rely on low-signature unmanned aerial and ground systems to bridge the final tactical miles, thereby reducing the vulnerability of large convoy movements. This transition, however, demands a fundamental restructuring of brigade-level logistics to ensure that dispersed caches can sustain high-tempo maneuver without creating easily targetable bottlenecks.

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