Ukraine is in danger from over reliance on centralized, linear logistics in an environment where Russia is dumping heavy distributed, persistent interdiction capability.
The German public broadcast service reports that a 20km death zone exists because Ukraine is still thinking in terms of scheduled resupply convoys – predictable, high-value targets. Russia just has to maintain a huge supply of cheap, operator-guided FPV drones and wait.
Looking at the map reminds me of American Civil War; this is a Grant moment at Vicksburg, not the bumbling suicidal Lee at Gettysburg. The decisive action isn’t going to be happening in tactical maneuver; it’s in the logistics architecture that enables maneuver.
Grant’s insight was from his famous quartermaster days, to win by making a supply system more resilient and adaptive than the enemy’s ability to disrupt it. His genius was application of multiple independent supply routes (river + rail + wagon trains), only living off the land as backup when necessary (controversial but resilient). His relentless operational tempo stressed Confederate logistics more than his own. Calculated losses in supply infrastructure were then possible because he could replace faster than the enemy could destroy.
If we translate Grant, the greatest American General and President in history, to today’s conflict:
- Pre-position distributed caches: Don’t resupply forward positions daily – establish 30-60 day hardened supply points that troops rotate through, such as decoy caches, frequent repositioning, or hardened underground storage.
- Multiple low-signature supply vectors: Autonomous ground vehicles, small cargo drones (10-20kg payloads, not 200kg), even human porters using covered routes.
- Expendable logistics: Accept that 30% of resupply attempts will be interdicted – build that into the planning ratios.
- Counter-logistics targeting: Interdict Russian logistics with same or more intensity than they’re applying to Ukraine (Crimean bridge and related operations aren’t widespread enough).
No amount of tactical brilliance can overcome a quartermaster system that can’t sustain the force. Grant understood this; Sherman then perfected it in his March to the Sea by making supply systems a weapon (although the latest research says the South was burning itself to the ground out of spite, per Lisa Brady or Sarah Rubin). It’s also why Napoleon and Lee were such disasterous, self-defeating fools (Lee’s army starved at Gettysburg partly because he cruelly refused to establish proper supply lines, while Napoleon killed 400,000 or more of his own men faster than his enemy could).
Fix the quartermaster problems, and the interesting tactical problems can come back into focus. This is exactly the wheelhouse of the modern CISO: resilience engineering in adversarial environments. The principles are identical – don’t prevent every and any breach, architect systems that balance and function through multitudes of disruption, so engineers can get back to deploying features instead of fixes.
Russian “trickle infiltration” currently works while Ukraine’s logistics aren’t yet delivering a proper distributed defense. The soldiers describe units refusing deployment to Myrnohrad outskirts because they’ll be cut off. That’s a present day rational response to logistics weakness, while the history on solutions is clear.
The logistics warfare element has been and will continue to be how all conflicts are fought (Taiwan, Korea, etc.), and any military dangerously unprepared for distributed interdiction environments will face this reality, just as we see it unfolding with drones in Ukraine.
Success means Ukrainian units sustaining 60 day deployments and longer without scheduled resupply. It means Russian FPV interdiction is economically unsustainable because of dispersed, low-value targets. It means Ukrainian casualties from logistics disruption falls more than 50% as operational tempo increases. These are engineering problems that all beg for innovation on historical solutions, as Grant showed in his legendary victories.
