Securing Ground Lines of Communication

New weapons in the Winter War of 2022 reveal an old problem

Drones in many ways are just new forms of a threat that ground forces once had to take into account to carry out operations. To be fair, the revived unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) threat to lines of communication (LOC) in the Winter War of 2022 is easier to carry out than old means of insurgents, partisans, special forces, or newer air-or artillery-delivered mines. But that just means the old methods need to be restored and updated.

The Ukrainians may be using lasers to disable the fiber optic links of Russian suicide “waiter drones” sitting on the ground waiting to ambush Ukrainians using the road:

A video purportedly from a Russian source seems to depict a Ukrainian drone sweeping a road with a laser. The point of view of the footage hints at why.

The video feed is from a fiber-optic “waiter” drone. An explosive first-person-view drone that connects to its operator via a miles-long optic fiber, and idles on a roadside in low-power mode, scanning for approaching enemy forces. …

Fiber-optic waiters are extremely dangerous. And that’s why both sides in Russia’s 49-month wider war on Ukraine are working so hard to defeat them.

Of course both sides are working to defeat such drones along their ground lines of communication. That’s war. An enemy finds a weakness to exploit and they do. Then you respond. The enemy then needs to react. Even a largely static war is dynamic in how it is waged.

This isn’t the only “new” threat that requires old (but updated) capabilities:

I addressed the issue of restoring route clearance tactics and capabilities in the face of such new threats in this essay, where I started with the problem in the Winter War of 2022 and noted that America re-learned the lesson in Somalia:

So the Army will (again) need to pay more attention to this threat. And I bet my alma mater is addressing it. As the Army had to address in Iraq where for a while the debate was speeding through an ambush versus taking the ambush as an opportunity to kill the attackers. And for a while airlift was used to reduce road traffic a bit.

Recall, too, the history of armor in Iraq where after major combat operations ended, some urged our soldiers to get out of their body armor and put on soft caps to reassure Iraqis. When Baathists began the series of resistance campaigns America and its allies defeated, the Humvees designed for a “safer” rear area role in Cold War Europe (my Humvee here in Michigan had no armor and sported vinyl doors) were up-armored in the field when the LOCs proved deadly under the ambush threat, and then equipped with armor in the factory; and then supplemented by purpose built MRAP (mine resistant ambush protected) vehicles.

Engineers, military police, cavalry, infantry, armor, and now air defense, drone (surveillance and attack) and electronic counter-measure assets will need to be combined for an expanded threat to LOCs. This requires work, as the August 1995 Engineers article cited earlier noted:

Experience at the JRTC shows that units consistently lose the initiative because they haven’t conducted sufficient combined arms route-clearance training at their home station.

The UAVs that fly in to establish road ambushes are new. But the threat is old. And we will need to master old skills that incorporate new tactics, weapons, and engineering support to defeat new forms of the old threat.

Hopefully our military is researching all the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) work for past solutions relevant for our new era of “unprecedented” problems on a number of topics.

NOTE: Figure from the April 1995 Engineer issue linked in the quoted section of my older essay.