Let's look at the facts.
We know Ukraine is in desperateIy need of munitions, and the fact that South Korea had to loan a lot of shells (I recall 500k) to fill in the gap is a major indicator of that. The US and Europe simply don't have the capacity to keep up with Ukraine's usage right now, and to have any chance, they have to match, but ideally surpass, Russia's output. Russia, as it happens, has mobilised a lot of new production capacity, replacing URAL repair yards with Rostec ones after sorting out the private debts of the companies when it comes to vehicle repairs (it was arguably a more arduous trek for Russian equipment to get fixed than for the AFU to send stuff to Germany, for instance).
The stories about M777 repairs needing the units to be sent back to the BAE Systems plants in the US is not a great indicator the West has retained capacity to prosecute modern high intensity operations against a peer threat.
Barrel production capacity in the West has been gutted by privatisation. The fact that the British military can no longer make precision gun barrels is a sore point for the people I know in the forces, along with our total land forces being 70k now. The US has the industrial capacity that the UK and EU lack, and even then, they are clearly short of HE delay shells. We’re sending buckshot you’d use against clay pigeons, when we should be sending meaty .50 cal. shells to take out the charging rhino coming at you.
Russia has been using cluster munitions for as long as this war has been going on, and I believe the AFU have too. That has not changed the course of the war, and it won't do anything against hardened positions. We know this because of Israel's deployment of DPICM in 2006 during the South Lebanon conflict, where the IDF had far better equipment and training and was still bogged down.
There are reports of the AFU reducing the amount of armour used in probing assaults, preferring to use light motorised units. This either means lack of equipment or reticence to use such because, as I would imagine is already obvious to many, the use of Western prestige equipment psychologically makes the Russians seem more likely to target it. I've seen countless Bradley and Leopard chassis burning from videos online, which doesn't help morale, and I won't be posting those links given their NSFW nature. The 47th, after that terrible minefield incident, hasn't deployed Challenger 2s as they received. Some say this is because the British MoD don't want them seen wrecked in public, some because, as stated above, they would be a prime target for any defensive battery on the Russian side.
Now, what can we do to change this? My primary focus would be to amass a sizeable force that can puncture through to the main defensive lines of Russia, something not seen yet. Indeed, from the maps I’ve seen, the AFU has so far gotten nowhere near the primary force components of the defensive barriers, which is troubling. This is down to a couple of things, both of which are not easy to address.
- NATO training has been done under the assumption that combined arms can be utilised as a NATO force would use it. The reason the US doesn’t have many SAM systems, for instance, is because the USAF is there to gain air superiority (or dominance as their 1990s doctrine switched to) to allow ground forces to move unhindered up to the enemy without threat of bombardment from the high ground. The dithering over F-16s and other aircraft has meant this offensive had to have minimal CAS aircraft committed, since a lot of Su-24 and 25s and similar ground attack aircraft have been lost to the Russian defences. Without air cover, your ground forces aren’t just open to artillery, of which Russia vastly outnumbers Ukraine. They’re also then open to the gunships like the Ka-52 using Vikhr and VKS fighter-bombers utilising FAB-500-M62 glide-bombs and other stand off munitions.
- Russia is fighting a positional war with Ukraine. Think WWI. NATO AirLand Battle doctrine of the ‘80s and onwards is more akin to manoeuvre warfare, as you saw in Blitzkrieg. Remember all the articles about the Maginot line and how this made static defences useless in a mechanised, air power led war? Well, that only holds if you can attain air superiority and you have the option to manoeuvre. If you can’t go round your enemy’s defence in depth, then you HAVE to go through it. And you cannot do this piecemeal. I cannot emphasise this enough, so I’ll say it again: You CANNOT force your enemy to rout in a fixed, well laid out defensive line by poking with small forces with high mobility. This may have been something that could have been achieved back in April 2022 or even late summer that year, but we are no longer in that state, unfortunately. The Russians have wised up, are far less eager to throw men into questionable moves (unless it’s Wagner’s penal units) and have a history of very good defensive discipline (see Barbarossa) when they get their act together. Nothing can be gained by having an understrength force go against this kind of setup. It’s like trying to blow out a bin on fire by using a Super Soaker and running around chasing the flame edge, when what you really need is a fireman’s hose directed at the base to punch through and dissipate the flame.
What I have heard the AFU is doing more of, is hitting rear echelon targets. If you have the munitions to reach them, you may as well do that to overall soften up your enemy’s force composition given the direct assaults aren’t going well. There are videos of munitions dumps going up in smoke and even a couple of Storm Shadows being tracked and allegedly shotdown by Pantsir AD (actually, even if the missile was taken out, this leads to the first documented instance of a modern stealth aircraft being tracked and engaged by an air defence system, which is an interesting topic in itself given the only equivalent was Serbia shooting down an F-117A in the ‘90s).
The take home point here if you wanted to skip all that above, is that sending cluster munitions is not a GOOD indicator of progress. Quite the opposite. It means the US has tapped out their munitions stocks and can’t get any allies to chip in with more, South Korea being obviously less eager to part with shells they stockpile against the North. Cluster munitions are also not magic. They will be of limited effectiveness for offensive operations, being more useful in a defensive and mining tactic compared to HE shells. They won’t do anything about barrel wear, which is also a growing problem given how much artillery is used (contrary to what I’ve seen written elsewhere, DPICM does not affect barrels less than normal HE 155 mm. They’re literally the same shell with a different filling). These munitions will make movement through any territory wherein they were used very dicey indeed, especially given the much, much higher dud rates found from the Israeli employment of M85 and similar ordnance.