Lessons from Ukraine: Utility of force, the futility of war & full spectrum warfare

Whether it is shaping the environment before the actual application of force or the difficulties of force application in urban environments, the Russia-Ukraine conflict has much to offer as takeaways.

AVM Arjun Subramaniam 

New Delhi

March 21, 2022

President Volodymyr Zelensky is displayed on a screen during a demonstration against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (AP photo)

As the conflict in Ukraine shows no signs of subsiding after almost four weeks of fighting even though diplomatic dialogue continues, there is much to reflect on some deeper issues of how war and conflict are likely to play out in the 21st Century. Whether it is shaping the environment before the actual application of force; the difficulties of force application in urban environments; how much force to apply to drive home expected outcomes; or what kind of external support can weaker belligerents hope to garner from the international environment, the Russia-Ukraine conflict has much to offer as takeaways.



Firstly, the utility of force as an instrument of statecraft in the 21st Century has not followed the trajectory as predicted by both practitioners and intellectuals in the recent past such as General Rupert Smith and Francis Fukuyama. While the former seriously questioned the utility of force in conventional conflict and the likelihood of war being conducted mainly ‘amongst the people’ in his bold book The Utility of Force :The Art of War in the Modern World, the latter predicted the rapid spread of the liberal world order, the continued pre-eminence of the US in global geopolitics and the declining propensity of nation-states to use force to drive political outcomes in his book The End Of History and the Last Man. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Galwan, South China Sea dynamics and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, all point at a return to the ‘laws of the jungle’ in global geopolitics that assert the continued presence of military power at the high table of deterrence and coercion along with economics.

Diplomacy across the world, for all its nuanced reasoning, logic and sophistication, has not made the world a safer place and yet, its seductive value of resolving disputes and differences without violence offers hope for mankind. This paradigm only reinforces the necessity for economic, military and diplomatic tool of statecraft to work in unison in pursuit of national interests, what is known as a ‘Whole of Government Approach.’ An ‘either/or’ or ‘my way or the highway’ approach that Vladmir Putin seems to be adopting has limited utility in a world where the internet and social media has compressed geographical distances that allows large portions of the world to rally together in pursuit of a common cause.

Equally surprising in Ukraine has been Russia’s widespread application of firepower to coerce a neighbour whose population shares religious, demographic and cultural affinities into submission despite knowing that the power of social media will always gravitate towards the underdog. The images of widespread destruction and personal loss, both in Ukraine and Russia point at the futility of war to achieve political outcomes.

What also emerges from this conflict is the propensity of political strongmen in dictatorships and autocracies, and even in evolved and developed societies to overestimate the robustness of their military plans and underestimate the resolve of their weaker adversaries. History reveals that the last large-scale application of force that resulted in the achievement of geopolitical outcomes was the creation of Bangladesh in December 1971 following a large-scale and multi-pronged military offensive by India’s armed forces into East Pakistan. On a smaller plane, the ambitious British operation to evict the Argentinians from the Falkland Islands in 1984 can also be considered similarly.

Since then, every large-scale invasion or intervention has yielded sub-optimal outcomes with Russia’s invasion driving home the seductiveness of force as an instrument of statecraft despite the ensuing futility of war as a means of achieving political objectives. While it is too early to predict the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the ensuing political outcomes, the widespread devastation of a developed country, loss of innocent lives and the refugee crisis will leave scars that are bound to manifest themselves in retaliatory bombings and killings in Russia and against Russian assets across the world.



A few decades ago, the accomplished Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld in his provocative book The Transformation of War, predicted the declining utility of air power, the demise of inter-state conflict and the predominance of sub-conventional operations in the global conflict landscape. He did so in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War when globalization was flattening the world; when the US seemed to be only global power; and when the only space for armed conflict was occupied by non-state actors who devised asymmetric means to combat the superior conventional capabilities of the state.

In the wake of this paradigm emerged genres of warfare such as proxy war, hybrid war, all measures short of war, salami slicing and more which were not only adopted by non-state actors, but gradually by powerful nation-states with large regular forces and revisionist ambitions like China, Pakistan, Russia and Turkey. Gaining traction was a realisation that below the nuclear threshold lay a window for sustained conventional operations that came to be known as limited conflict, an area that India is very familiar with having fought the high-intensity conflict in Kargil at the turn of the century.

From these propositions follows the concept of Full Spectrum Operations that seems to be the only way forward drawing from the experience of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Ukraine-Russia conflict; and closer home, to the evolving India-China rivalry that casts an ominous shadow over South Asian security.

Starting with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 by the ‘little Green Men,’ a covert Russian force; the gradual salami slicing of the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk; and the repeated coercive pronouncements from a resurgent and insecure Russia, reflected a progressive and calibrated Russian strategy to subvert a western-leaning but fragile democracy.

When all that failed, and trapped within the Thucydidian paradigm of ‘Fear, honour and interest,’ Putin climbed the escalation ladder as he attempted to coerce the Ukranians with a ‘show of force’ accompanied by a ‘minimum application of force.’ This is where the completely unexpected and unanticipated responses and pushback from the Ukranians and the ‘liberal West’ expanded the ‘Full Spectrum’ loop with inspirational leadership, citizen-resolve, swift economic and financial sanctions and a massive counter-barrage of cyber and social media that pushed Russia on the backfoot and forced it to expand its operations. This included the use of unrestricted firepower and multi-pronged air-land assaults to secure the various Centres of Gravity such as Kviv, Kharkiv and Mariopol. Completing the loop was a veiled nuclear threat from Putin and attempts by the West to internationally criminalize Putin’s act of war that resonates strongly in the backdrop of the effective orchestration of visual images that are designed to shock. Finally, rarely before have two unequally matched protagonists, concurrently engaged in formal diplomatic parleys even as death and destruction continued unabated. Full Spectrum all the way!

Emerging from the rubble of recent conflicts, both big and small, it appears to be a given that in a multi-polar world that India is championing, the use of force and the overriding influence of national interests will erode global peace, threaten global commons and see the emergence of contrarian ‘rules based’ templates. But do we really have any other options?

AVM Arjun Subramaniam 
(The author is a former fighter pilot, the President’s Chair of Excellence, National Defence College, Author of 'A Military History of India since 1972,' 'Full Spectrum' and 'India's Wars.' )