War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World | The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire | A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force

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The war in Ukraine has been going on for 3 years now, and much has been written about Vladimir Putin’s strategic failures and the valor of the Ukrainian defenders. The conflict has transformed from a poorly executed coup de main into a grinding war of attrition. It is time to take stock of this conflict. Learning from contemporary conflict is harder than it seems, but it is a small investment with big payoffs from crucial insights into the changing character of war.

These three books—War in Ukraine, The War for Ukraine, and A Call to Action—collectively offer wide-ranging perspectives from this violent contest of wills. Learning from this and any war is complicated by limitations in access to battle data, from determining what did or did not work and why, which is often blurred in the fog of war. This set of books provides history’s first cut of the confrontation, and each uses a different analytical lens across all three levels of war. 

At the strategic level, War in Ukraine offers a set of penetrating insights from an all-star cast of commentors. This well-edited anthology provides the reader with a study of the first 2 years of the war. While it is replete with incisive analysis, it contains no Ukrainian or Russia voices.

JFQ readers will find the chapter by Thomas Mahnken and Joshua Baker reveals numerous strategic insights that could be applied beyond Ukraine. Mahnken is a well-recognized defense strategist and leads a Washington-based think tank, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Baker is a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Their chapter offers an analysis based on several decisionmaking pathologies. These fallacies include the irrationality of war, the irrational adversary, the hyper-rational adversary, overestimation, silver bullets, and the faith of decisive victory. All of these can be seen in this contest by the antagonists or by commentators. It is a great case study for teaching strategy. As Mahnken and Baker note, “an awareness of the pitfalls that soldiers, statesmen, and scholars frequently fall prey to is a useful starting point to formulating and implementing sound strategy” (198). For that reason, this chapter should be mandatory reading in all U.S. professional military educational programs; it offers a diagnostic framework that might be applied in every case study in any policy and strategy department.

The chapter written by Alexander Bick is also noteworthy. It offers an insider’s perspective on National Security Council efforts to anticipate the implications of the alarming crisis in Ukraine. This illuminating chapter shows how the Joseph Biden administration learned from its planning shortfalls that led to the ignominious withdrawal from Kabul in the summer of 2021. This time the staff proposed—and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan approved—the charter of a “tiger team” that worked full time in late 2021 to assess the likelihood of a Russian invasion and possible U.S. policy responses. Bick details the tabletop exercises that this cross-functional team employed to explore its assumptions and the policy playbook it prepared for the President. The author is honest about the failings of imagination in the team. However, he concludes the team helped. Bick writes, “It enabled us to foresee challenges and requirements that had not yet arisen. And it provided a vehicle to explore and develop ideas that otherwise would have languished as agency leadership prioritized near-term demands” (149). The question that should be asked now is how these processes are institutionalized so that U.S. strategic competency is not subject to a sine wave of costly learning during turnovers in administrations. (See Frank Hoffman, “Risk: A Weak Element in U.S. Strategy Formulation,” JFQ 116, 1^st Quarter 2025).

Critics of the Biden administration’s risk aversion will find much to agree with in the critique of Washington’s strategy in a sharp chapter crafted by Kori Schake, a veteran policy practitioner and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She notes a persistent pattern in Washington’s slow responsiveness to Kyiv’s continual requests for advanced arms. While the Ukrainians were in an existential battle, the administration initially denied them requested weapons until other allies stepped in or when public and allied opposition reached a crescendo. Only then would “the Biden Administration bowing to public criticism and inter- national pressure and slowly relenting [provide] the systems months and even years later than when they would have been most effective” (164). History may ultimately find this era’s risk and escalation assessments to have been contradictory to U.S. interests.

The second book examined in this review, The War for Ukraine, was penned by retired Australian Army Major General Mick Ryan. He is no stranger to these pages (see his article “The Intellectual Edge: A Competitive Advantage for Future War and the Strategic Continuum,” JFQ 96, 1st Quarter 2020). Since his retirement, General Ryan has written three books, including both fiction and nonfiction accounts. (His War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict was reviewed in JFQ 108, 1^st Quarter 2023.) This third product is the result of several trips to Ukraine and offers two overlapping themes that have shaped the Russo-Ukrainian war: strategy and adaptation. The book is evenly divided by these interactive factors. In his net assessment of the contending strategies, the author uniquely defines Kyiv’s strategy as one of “corrosion,” which presumably fits in the middle of Hans Delbrück’s famous binary set of annihilation and exhaustion. In Ryan’s telling, this form of strategy includes the expanded competitive space of social and informational interaction between societies and the vulnerability of civil society due to cybersecurity weaknesses or the increased reach of long-range strike systems. This concept has utility in this conflict and may be a useful distinction worthy of further case studies and incorporation into military doctrine.

Ryan’s strategy discussions are excellent, particularly his discussion and comparison of Russia and Ukraine’s respective “theories of victory” in his superb dissection of the two countries’ strategies. Strategic scholars including Colin Gray and Williamson Murray put more stock into a larger conception of a theory of success rather than the narrower concept of a theory of victory that may focus on achieving military victory at the expense of attaining the better peace that proper political guidance would frame (see Frank Hoffman, “The Missing Element in Crafting National Strategy: A Theory of Success,” JFQ 97, 2^nd Quarter 2020). General Ryan appreciates the distinction; he declares “postwar prosperity, reintegration, reconstruction, and justice will all be necessary elements of a more enduring ‘victory’ for Ukraine” (65).

Ryan touches on one other enduring constant in war: the human dimension. Though he identifies several critical technologies displayed in the conflict, including Starlink, rocket systems, artillery fires, targeting mesh networks, artificial intelligence, and drones, he underscores the centrality of war as a human endeavor. “While machines and information are vital elements in human competition and war,” Ryan observes, “it is humans who decide how these are used, where, when, and in what organizational constructs that ultimately decide victory and defeat” (11).

The third book, A Call to Action, is an anthology based on a research study conducted by the U.S. Army War College. The project was overseen by John A. Nagl and Colonel Katie Crombe and contains 18 chapters, most penned by students at the Army’s top-level school. The design of the team’s effort is based around battle functions, which generate a comprehensive assessment of the conflict at the operational level. While the project is sponsored by an institution focused principally on land warfare, the book includes chapters on naval operations in the Black Sea and the air war in Ukraine. Every chapter concludes with relevant lessons for application by the Army, with clear and actionable recommendations. The book finds that Ukraine offers lessons similar in importance to those the U.S. Army culled from Israel’s struggles in the Yom Kippur War five decades ago, which were translated into a successful U.S. Army transformation.

The chapter devoted to fires is chockfull of insights on Ukrainian adaptability. The author, Lieutenant Colonel John “Jay” B. Bradley III, also provides a critique of Russian fires systems, including Russia’s “nearly fanatical” reliance on artillery (92). He attributes the Russian Army shortfalls to its poor automated command and control systems and its overly centralized command structures. Conversely, “Ukraine’s ability to make decisions at the lowest level has yielded increased success” (99). Kyiv’s leaders adopted mission command and introduced command and control systems that allowed the Ukrainians to efficiently apply precision munitions and fires against high-value targets. This chapter details the entrepreneurial agility of the Ukrainians.

The author makes explicit the need for the Army to be ready for constant movement and increased force protection. He also recommends adopting systems supported by artificial intelligence (AI) for both dynamic targeting and air space management. Bradley writes, “The targeting process must incorporate AI, autonomous solutions, redundant communication capabilities, and permissive control measures” so that organic fires can match the pace of large-scale and dynamic operations (107). One critical note, however—there is little appreciation for the role of drones as sensors or as a form of fires. Readers will find this topic covered in detail in Ryan’s The War for Ukraine.

Another key chapter, written by U.S. Army Colonel Jamon K. Junius, deals with Mission Command, a leadership philosophy that is central to joint doctrine in the United States. Ukrainian fighting forces are operating far from their major headquarters, which are led by senior officers who may retain too much of the centralized Soviet doctrine they were initially trained with. However, in Ukraine’s prewar training, Ukrainian generals understood the benefits of promoting the trust and initiative that are synonymous with Mission Command. General Valery Zaluzhny, then the head of the Ukrainian defense establishment, sought to promote “a decentralized, empowered, more agile way of warfare than the Russian model” (119). Mission Command has proved itself again in Ukraine, despite the lack of the mutual trust and cohesion normally generated by doctrine, repeated exercises, and extended association.

In toto, War in Ukraine, The War for Ukraine, and A Call to Action represent the best of a growing flood of analyses of the ongoing tragedy in eastern Europe. Brands’s book is especially invaluable on U.S. national security considerations and has exceptional value to top-level schools and civilian security studies curricula. General Ryan’s book is particularly suited for a larger audience, including command and staff colleges, due to its extensive links to foundational literature for students of the profession of arms. A Call to Action will interest anyone who wants to absorb insights from the battlefield and the ever-changing character of warfare.

Further studies about the war in Ukraine will eventually emerge, once the drones and bullets stop flying and historians can interrogate the facts and the fictions. For now, this set is the best collection of insights at each level of war and across all battlefield functions. Understanding the present in context is a requisite step to learning and for preparing for the future. JFQ