Ukraine war Exclusive: Alarming Live Lab for Future Wars
India’s top soldier has offered a stark assessment of the Ukraine war, calling it a live laboratory for future conflicts and a real-time case study that India cannot afford to ignore. Army chief General Upendra Dwivedi said on Wednesday that the Indian Army is tracking battlefield developments in Ukraine closely, given their direct relevance to India’s own high-altitude frontiers, contested borders, and evolving security challenges. In a region where technology, tactics, and geopolitics can shift overnight, the Ukraine war is providing a hard, unfiltered look at what modern warfare actually looks like—how it starts, how it sustains, and how it breaks.
Image: Bayraktar TB2 drone, emblematic of the drone revolution highlighted by the Ukraine war. Credit: CeeGee, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
What the Ukraine war is teaching modern militaries
The reality unfolding across the fields and cities of Ukraine has stripped away illusions and marketing brochures. It is a grinding, tech-heavy, people-intensive contest that fuses 20th-century attrition with 21st-century sensors. Key takeaways:
– Drones everywhere, all the time: From commercial quadcopters to long-endurance platforms and loitering munitions, drones are now integral to reconnaissance, artillery spotting, and precision strikes. The Ukraine war shows that controlling the air at low altitude may matter as much as traditional air superiority.
– Electronic warfare as a daily knife fight: Both sides jam GPS, disrupt communications, and hunt for emitters. Units that survive are those that master emissions control, redundancy, and the rapid switch between comms pathways.
– Artillery remains the god of war—if it’s fed: Tube and rocket artillery dominate when paired with digital targeting and real-time ISR feeds. The limiting factor isn’t just barrels but ammunition, logistics, and maintenance cycles.
– Fortifications, mines, and mobility: The front is a lattice of trenches, dragon’s teeth, minefields, and counter-mobility obstacles. Armored vehicles still matter, but protected mobility, breaching, and route clearance are now decisive enablers.
– Air defense is layered—or it fails: From MANPADS to medium-range systems, survivability depends on integrated air defense, camouflage, deception, and rapid displacement.
– Sustainment is strategy: Fuel, spares, medevac, and battlefield repair determine tempo. Units that protect logistics convoys, exploit rail and road hubs, and manage attrition can hold ground; those that don’t, can’t.
– Transparency is the new normal: Satellites, drones, open-source intelligence, and smartphones make it harder to hide. Deception, decoys, and disciplined communications are no longer optional.
Implications for India’s borders
India’s military operates across extremes—from the glaciated heights of the northern borders to the densely inhabited plains near the Line of Control. The Ukraine war highlights several imperatives for these environments:
– Counter-drone dominance: Expect sUAS swarms, loitering munitions, and persistent ISR near friction points. India’s push into counter-UAS systems—jammers, kinetic interceptors, and directed-energy prototypes—must accelerate alongside indigenous drone swarms and hardened datalinks that can ride out jamming.
– Survivable communications: Redundant, multi-band networks with satellite overlays, mesh radios, and fiber backbones will be vital. Training for comms silence, burst transmissions, and anti-jam resilience has to be normalized at the unit level.
– Precision fires and ISR fusion: Integrating UAV feeds with artillery fire control—and doing it fast—will multiply lethality. Mapping and clearing minefields, tasking loitering munitions, and protecting gun lines will define operational tempo.
– Logistics under fire: High-altitude sustainment, prepositioned stocks, and forward repair facilities can decide outcomes in a contested electromagnetic environment.
– Protection and deception: Camouflage nets, signature management, decoys, and frequent relocation will keep units alive under drone-enabled targeting. Old-school fieldcraft is making a comeback, updated for a sensor-saturated battlefield.
Image: Precision rocket artillery like HIMARS has reshaped expectations of long-range fires in the Ukraine war. Credit: Sgt. Mikki L. Sprenkle, U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Modernization and training: From lessons to capability
The Indian Army’s modernization road map already points toward many of these lessons. Expect visible emphasis on:
– Drone ecosystem at scale: Indigenous sUAS for surveillance and strike, hardened control links, AI-aided target recognition, and autonomous logistics platforms for difficult terrain.
– Counter-UAS and EW suites: Tiered jamming, spoofing, radar, and optical sensors, plus mobile kill systems to defend forward posts, gun lines, and logistics nodes. Unit-level EW literacy will become as fundamental as marksmanship.
– Long-range precision fires: More rockets, smarter artillery, and tighter ISR integration, with logistics pipelines to sustain high rates of fire without grinding units down.
– Air defense layering: Expanding MANPADS coverage, point-defense systems for key assets, and a better kill chain that fuses radar, EO/IR, and acoustic cues.
– Soldier survivability: Better body armor, anti-fragmentation gear, night-fighting devices, and field-ready power solutions to keep sensors and radios alive in the cold and at altitude.
– Training reforms: Realistic EW-contested drills, drone-vs-drone exercises, breaching and demining proficiency, and deception operations practiced as standard, not specialty.
The risks of misreading the “live lab”
The Ukraine war is a trove of insight—but not a cookie-cutter template. Terrain, force composition, political constraints, and escalation thresholds differ. A few cautions stand out:
– Attrition doesn’t substitute for strategy: High losses may be unsustainable for some militaries; conservation of force remains vital.
– Not all tech scales: What works for a brigade in Donbas may not translate to high-altitude ridge lines or desert sectors without adaptation.
– Deterrence matters: Logistics, resilience, and transparent readiness can prevent miscalculation—if paired with credible capability and clear signaling.
Image: Urban destruction in Irpin underscores the human and infrastructural costs of the Ukraine war. Credit: Ninara, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
A sober conclusion from a hard battlefield
General Dwivedi’s message is pragmatic and timely: the Ukraine war is a real-time tutorial in modern conflict that India must study deeply and adapt intelligently. The core lesson is neither techno-optimism nor fatalism—it is preparedness. Drones have not replaced infantry, artillery has not eclipsed maneuver, and electronic warfare has not erased the value of disciplined fieldcraft. Instead, the battlefield now punishes single-point failures and rewards combined arms done fast, quiet, and resiliently.
For India, that means accelerating the drone-counterdrone race, hardening communications, reinforcing logistics, and drilling deception and survivability until they become muscle memory. It also means resisting the temptation to import solutions wholesale. The right move is to absorb the patterns of the conflict, translate them for the Himalayas and the plains, and build enduring, indigenous capability.
The stakes are plain enough. The Ukraine war continues to evolve, and with it the blueprint for future wars. Treating it as a live lab—methodically, critically, and with an eye to India’s unique realities—could make the difference between surprise and readiness when it matters most.
News by The Vagabond News
