Western militaries need to start figuring out how to fight long and bloody attritional wars like Ukraine, former Army officer warns

"In attritional wars, military operations are shaped by a state's ability to replace losses and generate new formations, not tactical and operational manoeuvres," retired US Army lieutenant colonel Alex Vershinin explained in a Royal United Services Institute commentary, "The Attritional Art of War: Lessons from the Russian War on Ukraine," published Monday. Unlike maneuver warfare, which is aimed at quickly and violently defeating an enemy, the attritional fight takes time, maybe years.