Adapting to the Threat – LTCOL James Ellis-Smith

‘The reason [the adaptation] is so quick is because they’re being pressed by a very capable adversary.’ In this week’s episode, we shift focus to how Ukraine and Russia are adapting to the threat as each fight in war. Our guest this week – LTCOL James Ellis-Smith – has just raised the Training Intelligence (G72) cell at Forces Command Headquarters, feeding real-world analysis into our training to bring our adversary analysis into the specific and contemporary. He is also a PhD candidate at the Australian National University, studying intelligence and command at the tactical level of war.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the conflict has been defined by rapid adaptation and brutal attrition. Long-range precision fires, the widespread use of unmanned aerial systems, contested logistics, and a return to trench warfare have epitomised the conflict. We can learn a considerable amount from the pace of adaptation in this fight, with both sides attempting to keep pace with rapid advancements in technology and training, techniques and procedures (TTPs). The addition of low-cost guidance kits to ‘dumb’ munitions has enabled both sides to deliver precision effects using existing war stocks, fundamentally changing the economics of precision munitions. Wireless drones that were susceptible to jamming have been replaced and complimented with drones flown using fibre optic cables.

Among the many sobering realities of this conflict are reports of frontline medics stabilising wounded soldiers under fire, only for those casualties to be killed during evacuation—struck by precision weapons kilometres from the point of injury. In this episode, LTCOL Ellis Smith helps us unpack what these developments mean for Army’s thinking on training, adaptation, and preparing for the demands of contemporary and future conflict. He also seeks to distinguish those lessons that we ought to take into our Primary Operating Environment versus those that are unique to a land conflict between two nations that share a large land border.

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