Key Points – The war in Ukraine is teaching Western defense planners a critical lesson: mass and affordability can be more important than technological perfection.
-NATO leaders like Secretary-General Mark Rutte and Ukrainian defense industry officials argue that the West’s focus on small numbers of expensive, high-end “perfect” weapons is ill-suited for a protracted, attritional war.
-Instead, they advocate for a “high-low” mix, emphasizing the need for vast quantities of “good enough,” cheaper systems—like Ukraine’s Bohdana howitzer or America’s A-10 in Desert Storm—that can be produced at scale to overwhelm an adversary, rather than relying solely on precision munitions that are costly and vulnerable to countermeasures like electronic warfare.
Is NATO’s ‘Perfect Weapon’ Obsession a Mistake? Lessons from Ukraine
In a recent interview, Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish defense minister, characterized “one of the lessons” from Ukraine is being the West needs far greater quantities of inexpensive – meaning considerably less expensive than what is the standard now – weaponry to adequately meet the threats being presented by Russia and China.
The NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, delivered an almost identical message to the alliance members earlier this year.
NATO nations, he said, are too slow at developing ‘new’ weapons. The alliance, he said, was working toward always being perfect, “but it doesn’t have to be perfect.”
One of the lessons of the war, he continued, was that Ukraine’s military is willing to fight with – and has delivered stellar performance with – equipment that would rank at “6 to 7” on a scale of 1 to 10. Meanwhile, he said, NATO militaries insist on operating with weapon systems that are “9 or 10” on that same scale.
He then explained he was not calling for an end to expensive weaponry altogether, but instead the lesson from the Ukraine conflict is striking the right balance: It’s about “getting speed and enough quality done in the right conjunction.”
Ukraine: The West Has the Wrong Approach
Ukraine defense industry officials are now increasingly calling for the West to curtail its traditional reliance on high-end, expensive weaponry in favor of lower-priced, mass-produced arms.
They say the weaponry that is needed to win the kind of positional war of attrition against an opponent like Russia is that which is still qualitatively better.
But it is also cheaper to a degree that it can be affordably manufactured in numbers that will overwhelm the other side.
Serhiy Goncharov, the CEO of the National Association of Ukrainian Defense Industries (NAUDI), a trade organization that represents about 100 Ukrainian companies — told Business Insider that the West is still depending on the wrong type of weaponry.
Modest numbers of state-of-the-art hardware served the US and its allies well in short, high-tempo conflicts like Operation Desert Storm.
However, reliance on them for any and all conflicts could expose some major pitfalls in a protracted war like that in Ukraine.
Those expensive systems are good to have, and they have their place in any conflict.
But what is now proving to be the new face of modern warfare calls for overwhelming numbers of cheap drones and other low-tech solutions.
Operation Desert Storm is famous for being the ideal example of how high-technology precision munitions of the West were always the best answer – proven in how they decimated an Iraqi military equipped with Soviet weaponry.
But details of the conflict demonstrate still nonetheless the virtues of lower-priced weapons platforms.
One such instance from a report written about a year after the Coalition forces took back Kuwait.
The cheapest-to-operate combat aircraft in that conflict was the A-10 Warhog. It was “responsible for over half of all the Iraqi equipment lost in battle, destroyed more tanks than any other aircraft (1,000), achieved the highest sortie rate, and the highest readiness rate of any US Air Force combat aircraft in Desert Storm. At only $12 million each, this lone example of a cheaphawk ‘reform’ weapon in Desert Storm succeeded with flying colors.”
On the other hand, in order to “have enough spare parts to keep the 274 Apache attack helicopters in the Gulf ready for battle 90 percent of the time, the Army essentially grounded the remaining 300 Apaches worldwide.”
“Even so, the Apaches in the Persian Gulf flew only an average of a half an hour per day – approximately the same as they fly in peacetime – and one fifth as much as the Army originally planned for them to fly in combat. Such low levels of activity inflate the readiness figures to make the Apache appear to be more reliable than it actually was.”
The Ukraine Battlefield
Back in Ukraine, Goncharov singled out the M107 self-propelled artillery gun that was put in service by the US in the 1960s as an example of an inexpensive weapon that is effective when fielded in large numbers.
“You don’t need 10 Archers (an artillery system made by BAE Systems) from the Swedish that are probably one of the best artillery systems in the world,” he said. “Instead, you need 200 cheap howitzers, such as the Bohdana one that Ukraine makes.”
In another example, Goncharov pointed to the US military’s M982 Excalibur guided munition. For that system each shell costs $100,000, but they “don’t work” when the other side has electronic warfare systems and simpler, older-generation artillery rounds that are not only 30 times cheaper but always in tremendous supply.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, the former defense minister of Lithuania, also spoke to the same publication that interviewed Goncharov. He has called the war with Russia as one of “high quantities” and has said the West has been too singularly focused on modern, expensive weaponry that takes a long time to manufacture.
Meanwhile, Russia had been “building something that’s cheap, that’s expendable, that’s fast.” He described the West as “preparing for a different kind of war” than what it would experience in a fight against Russia, and that always focusing on impressive equipment that is “very expensive” is the wrong calculus.
More Is the New Better in Modern Warfare?
More than three decades ago, while I was analyzing Soviet weapon designs, it became apparent that the qualitatively superior weapons of the US and European nations outclassed those of the USSR.
But the Russian designers still understood one central truth of weapons design: “better” is the enemy of “good enough,” was their golden rule. It is a concept worth re-examining today.
About the Author:
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
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