How Global Rules of Power Are Changing Fast

When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, all major parties got it wrong. Ukraine considered a full-scale invasion unlikely and was preparing for an escalation in the eastern Donbas region. Russia had greatly overestimated its capabilities and was poorly prepared for what it expected to be an easy win. The United States and Britain had the intelligence necessary to predict the invasion but did not convey it convincingly to Ukraine’s leaders.

With the massive data and advanced analytical technologies currently available to decision-makers, how were these colossal strategic failures possible?

In Statecraft, Jack Watling provides a step-by-step analysis of how the global rules of power have changed. Watling is a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and has published widely on modern warfare, including a book on the weaponry of the future and articles in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy and The Guardian. He works closely with the British, Ukrainian and U.S. militaries and advises governments on security and strategy.

In fast-paced modern warfare, timing is not linear and decision-makers need to base actions around inflection points. The opposition in Syria and the Taliban in Afghanistan both succeeded against overwhelming odds because they waited for the other side to weaken and carefully selected the appropriate time to act.

And when the Syrian government in 2013 used chemical weapons against the opposition, which had been highlighted by U.S. president Barack Obama as a red line that would lead the U.S. to retaliate, the U.S. wasted time mustering up support from its allies. This allowed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to come back with a counter-proposal, ultimately deflating the U.S. threat of retaliation.

Watling also takes a close look at questions of scale and provides examples of Russia’s failure to make full use of its superior numbers. Disabling Ukraine’s energy infrastructure was a key Russian objective and, due to Ukraine’s harsh winters, would have forced residents to abandon strategically located cities. However, instead of focusing on this objective, Russia’s use of missiles was haphazard and dispersed and never achieved the scale needed to completely destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

Statecraft includes an important chapter on prioritisation, the need to distinguish between the genuinely important and the urgent but less important. In 2014, the collapse of Iraqi forces defending the city of Mosul drew international attention away from what was happening in Ukraine, although from a Western perspective the latter was by far the bigger security issue. And this year, U.S. aggression towards Iran has sucked the oxygen from support for Ukraine.

Perceptions are often key, and understanding an adversary’s perspective in a multicultural setting is seldom easy. Politics frequently override technical issues. Ukraine pushed long and hard to be provided with F-16 fighters, mainly because they would have signalled to Russia that it had strong U.S. support. However, F-16s are technically complex and logistically demanding, and their flight and maintenance crews require lengthy training. From a purely technical point of view, Watling points out, lower-maintenance fighters would have been a more practical choice.

Watling also provides a valuable discussion on new technologies. The blending of commercial and military uses poses a host of legal and strategic challenges. Watling cites the example of satellites simultaneously underpinning financial transactions, internet stability and emergency services to one country while transmitting military information to another.

Drones and AI have upended the nature of field combat, rendering many established technologies vulnerable or obsolete and shifting weapons development and manufacturing from factories to basement workshops in bombed-out buildings. In one example, a lone Ukrainian hacker developed a tracking system based on sound detection from a network of microphones placed strategically on infrastructure. On his laptop, he was able to identify and track objects on the ground and in the air anywhere in the country.

Despite rapid advances in technology, however, Watling reminds us that strategic decisions – and mistakes – are still the prerogative of human beings.

Robert Wihtol is an adjunct faculty member at the Asian Institute of Management and former Asian Development Bank country director for China and director general for East Asia.

Image of a Ukrainian F-16: Ukrainian Air Force/Wikimedia Commons.

AI contributed no ideas to this article – Robert Wihtol.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).