The Return of Artillery: Rethinking the Future of War Post-Ukraine

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Introduction

The war in Ukraine has shattered Western expectations of 21st-century warfare, revealing a battlefield dominated by artillery barrages and trench networks rather than the anticipated high-tech precision operations. Even with the growing role of drones, cyber tools, and information operations, the war is still driven by more basic realities: the ground it is fought on, the kinds of forces each side can put into the field, and the ways they are used to fighting.

That is why artillery continues to dominate, at times giving the conflict an echo of World War I, even if the larger picture is far more complex.

This article explores the reasons behind this trend on the Ukrainian battlefield and what it reveals about the likely nature of future warfare on the European continent.

Previous Conceptions of 21st-Century Warfare

Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, the West, particularly NATO, struggled to define the future of warfare and global politics. A large-scale war in Europe was widely deemed improbable. The 1991 Gulf War, defined by cutting-edge technology, speed, and maneuver, strongly influenced Western perceptions of future warfare. Later, the 9/11 attacks and U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq placed counterinsurgency and terrorism at the center of Western security priorities. These developments, paired with rapid technological progress, led to a widespread belief that high-tech, unconventional armed conflicts would dominate 21st-century warfare. Consequently, intellectual, financial, and military investments shifted toward these domains, often at the expense of more traditional capacities like artillery and mechanised forces.

The expectations of 21st-century warfare were greatly formed by futurist visions and the excitement surrounding emerging technology. Technological determinists, who see technological progress as the primary driver of military change, and not only they, convinced many scholars and political leaders that state-of-the-art technology would fundamentally reshape the nature of modern warfare. It was widely expected that 21st-century conflict would center on precision-guided munitions, information dominance, space-based assets, and cyber capabilities. 

As Schneider wrote, “Another principle of war flowing from technical innovations is the dominance imparted by using precision guided weapons. Suddenly, with great precision, nearly all important fixed targets can be destroyed in a campaign. Instead of having to fire thousands of bombs and missiles at targets, just a few will do the job today with much greater certainty than the imprecise massed attacks of yesterday. “ (Schneider & Grinter, 1998, p. 37).

The assumption was that states’ abilities in these domains would define a new balance of power. This trend is clearly observable through NATO's Strategic Concepts from 2006 to 2022, which emphasise new technologies and hybrid threats while often downplaying traditional warfighting domains.

The Enduring Centrality of Artillery

In Battlefield of the Future (1995), Jeffrey McKitrick, James Blackwell, Fred Littlepage, George Kraus, Richard Blanchfield, and Dale Hill identified four revolutionary domains of warfare, such as long-range precision strike, information warfare, dominating maneuver, and space warfare, mirroring the interwar innovations of armored and carrier warfare, amphibious operations, and strategic bombing. They predicted a nonlinear, complex future battlefield characterized by rapid mobility and deep penetration. While these capabilities are real and well-integrated into modern forces, their transformative power has not been demonstrated in Ukraine as dramatically as expected. In World War I, trench warfare became the defining feature of attrition-based conflict, locking armies into static positions. By World War II, artillery had evolved into a dynamic element of combined arms operations, enhancing mobility. Yet, Ukraine’s battlefield today appears to have reverted to a model much closer to the First World War.

Another trend anticipated, particularly in relation to potential conflicts with Russia, was the increasing dominance of hybrid warfare, which combines conventional and unconventional means. This focus on hybrid warfare largely originated from the so-called Gerasimov doctrine, a term introduced by Mark Galeotti (2017). The doctrine claims that the major mode of warfare of the near future would be non-linear, hybrid, characterised by guerrilla-style warfare rather than full-scale trench warfare in 20th-century fashion. The key examples of hybrid warfare were the Russo-Georgian war in 2008, where cyber and information attacks were extensively introduced, and the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014-2015, where Russia used unmarked “little green men”, aggressive cyber attacks on government infrastructure, and flooding informational warfare. These events created somewhat of an “optical illusion” of the future forms of warfare, centered on informational and cyber realms.

The major reason why the military dynamics of the war in Ukraine are often seen in parallel with World War I is its heavy dependency on trench warfare and artillery. In January 2023, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with Le Monde (2023) that the long battle in Bakhmut is “a 21st-century version of the battle of Verdun”.  Despite the presence of modern technologies, Ukraine’s battlefield dynamics are clearly dominated by trenches.  Some scholars argue that the way drones were implemented during war also shares some characteristics with the early stage of aircraft use in World War I - artillery spotting is an initial step for later drone attacks; therefore, it is not utilized for surprise tactical maneuvers.

It is interesting that in the Russo-Ukrainian war, apart from long trenches and steppes, artillery is used in urban warfare too. This goes quite close to the type of war that we can expect in Europe in the future, artillery-centric hybrid warfare encompassing both urban, such as in Bakhmut from August 2022 to May 2023, and conventional (Zaporizhia) environments.

One possible explanation for these dynamics is the protracted nature of the war in both time and space. The conflict has lasted over three years, far beyond the Kremlin’s early expectations. High-tech, maneuver-centric warfare appears to have limitations in sustained, large-scale conflicts. Also, it is crucial to highlight that the frontline length has varied from 1500 km to 3000 km in different periods of war, which apparently also favours an artillery-centric style rather than excessive use of UAVs and other technological advancements.

Also, the artillery-dominant warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian war could be caused by the Russian military's inclination towards it. Russia, as an initiator of the conflict and a more militarily capable state, can determine its manner and major military trends. It can be argued that the predisposition towards artillery is the result of Russia’s arsenal and military production leaning towards it.  According to AWC scholars (2016) in the "Russian New Generation Warfare Handbook," artillery holds a special place in Russian military culture, where it is called the "God of War." The Russian army simply favors it because of its firm and stable capabilities in this domain, and Ukraine, on the other hand, lacking equivalent means in comparison to Russia, has had limited ability to alter this balance, except for the sporadic counteroffensive maneuvers such as the Kursk offensive.

In addition to that, hybrid warfare characteristics have been present in the past three years. However, the scale and impact of hybrid elements of war have been rather limited if we compare the previous expectations endorsed by previous Russian aggressions in Georgia and Ukraine.

Further, another reason why the war is not dictated by intensive aircraft bombings on an everyday basis may stem from Russia’s fear of escalation to some extent, in order to avoid Western direct interference. For this aim, Russia also employs a nuclear strategy of gestures and signaling to make its nuclear threat credible for Europeans and Americans.

However, this restraint may not apply in a future military confrontation between Russia and Western forces. In that scenario, Russia may not be limited to trench-centric warfare. Still, other structural determinants such as its organizational habits, production capacities, geography, and front length are unlikely to change in the near or medium term.

Conclusion

All these factors behind the Russian inclination to artillery-driven trench warfare - strategic culture, resource availability, terrain, and war duration - indicate the most likely characteristics of the future of war on the European continent. Nevertheless, Russia’s anxiety about further escalation may limit some forms of aggression in Ukraine; a broader European confrontation could lift some of these constraints.

In conclusion, the war in Ukraine exposes the persistence of traditional military dynamics, even in the age of cyber and precision warfare. While not a perfect blueprint, it offers a compelling model for the likely shape of future conflict in Europe and provides critical insights for shaping European security strategies moving forward.

This article represents the views of contributors to STEAR's online digital publication, and not those of STEAR, which takes no institutional positions.

Nino Lomidze is a Georgian foreign politics journalist based in Tbilisi and M.A. student in International Security. Nino have reported extensively on EU-Georgia relations, regional security, Russia-Ukraine war, and political developments in the South Caucasus, with various media outlets. Nino's academic and professional focus lies at the intersection of strategy, security, and democratic resilience in Eastern Europe.

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