The Deep Strike Dodge: Firepower and Manpower in Ukraine’s War
Time and again since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there has been extended political wrangling among Western governments and Ukraine over purported wonder weapons that will turn the tide of the war. After the provision of main battle tanks, HIMARS rockets, and fighter jets, the most recent controversy has been over the use of deep strike (in actuality, short-range ballistic missile) ATACMS systems to hit targets in Russia. While ATACMS have had only a modest effect on the fierce fighting for the Kursk salient, the year-long back and forth over this weapons system has had a real impact on the larger war. The deep strike debate has enabled President Volodymyr Zelensky to avoid confronting the real crux of his country’s war: manpower.
As recently as September, Zelensky told U.S. senators that with enough U.S. missiles, he could bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. The Ukrainian president’s Western amplifiers have long made even more grandiose claims about the impact of Western firepower, despite the clear constraint of limited American and Ukrainian ATACMS stocks.
The six-month U.S. congressional stalemate that held up munitions shipments to Ukraine from late 2023 to mid-2024 led to Ukrainian losses of men and territory by inducing an enormous deficit of artillery ammunition. This was only partially mitigated by Ukraine’s burgeoning domestic drone production. But the situation in Ukraine has changed since last spring. Ukrainian forces now have parity and sometimes even a small firepower edge at important points on the 600-mile frontline. Ukraine’s shell hunger has been largely sated for the time being. Firepower and materiel are no longer the Russo-Ukrainian war’s center of gravity.
Hard Decisions Deferred
Since the invasion, Zelensky has repeatedly avoided a serious Ukrainian mobilization for a long war. When Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi called for drafting 500,000 more soldiers in late 2023, Zelensky quickly replaced him with Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi. After the Ukrainian parliament passed a bill to lower the minimum draft age from 27 to 25, Zelensky sat on it for 10 months before finally signing it in April 2024. Enormous gaps in the mobilization system remain. Even doctors and other medical clinicians, critical to saving soldiers’ lives and preserving the morale of the entire army, are mobilized only incidentally.
After Ukraine repulsed Russia’s opening thrust at Kyiv in March 2022, it seemed that manpower might be a Ukrainian advantage. Russia’s invasion force, at just 190,000 men, was far too small to conquer Ukraine after the initial gamble on a coup de main failed. Fearing protests and political instability at home, Putin was loath to put young conscripts into combat or compel ex-servicemen to re-enlist. When finally forced to do so as a response to the successful September 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensive, the messy mobilization drove hundreds of thousands of young men to flee Russia — though it also stabilized the lines at a moment of maximum Russian vulnerability and Ukrainian momentum.
The Limits of Volunteerism
Ukraine’s failure to mobilize early, quickly, and aggressively, has now come back to bite it. With American support uncertain, it may now cost Kyiv the war. An initial flood of volunteers in 2022 eventually petered out as the war ground on, fatigue mounted, and the brutal conditions at the shell- and drone-scoured zero line became clear. Just 12 percent of new Ukrainian recruits are volunteers, according to Defense Minister Rustem Umerov in an October 2024 Fox News interview. That figure may be optimistic.
Inadequate manpower also induces an unknowable but potentially decisive threat of mass exhaustion and morale collapse. Many Ukrainian soldiers have been at war with minimal interruption since 2014. Going absent without official leave (AWOL) from brigades has become endemic, to the point that Ukraine recently decriminalized the first such offense for soldiers. This second chance has allowed soldiers to recommit and return to their units, or, increasingly, to be poached by other brigades and restart their service in new units. Either way, Ukraine gets some of these men back to the front.
Raw numbers are not the only manpower problem Ukraine faces. After the draft age was lowered to 25, the age of frontline soldiers, according to Ukrainian commanders and Western analysts like Rob Lee and Michael Kofman, has somehow gone up. The average Ukrainian infantryman is now at least 43 years old. Many soldiers older than this average are unfit for frontline duty and so are ultimately spared service in the zero line. A Ukrainian brigade may often only have a company or even a platoon of younger, healthier soldiers that can conduct offensive operations. A medical officer on the Kursk front in December told me that while the average age in his battalion was 40, the average age of wounded men in the unit was only 28.
Inadequate frontline manpower has led to a vicious cycle: Insufficient troop strength means training quality has gone down because there is such intense pressure to get more men. These inadequately trained, inexperienced men then take heavy casualties, resulting in an immediate need for more men in the trenches. This news reaches Ukrainian civilians, who become even more reluctant to serve. And so it repeats.
Force Management Failures
This dysfunctional dynamic has been exacerbated by Ukrainian force management decisions. Instead of using new recruits to fill losses in existing brigades, the Ukrainian military stands up new brigades full of inexperienced recruits, even as experienced units that have seldom left the frontline are bled white and not adequately replenished. This leads to understrength brigades being haphazardly supplemented with battalions cannibalized from other formations. The loaned battalions are regularly denuded of arms, officers, and even manpower by their parent formations. These organizational orphans are thrust into the fight by their new commands and pay dearly.
Ukraine has just belatedly announced plans to institute a corps system, to mitigate the paradoxical combination of inattention and micro-management that has plagued the current command and control by over-tasked operational-tactical groups. Whether corps can be stood up and effectively command as Ukraine’s lines deteriorate is an open question.
The manpower situation has gotten so bad that Ukraine is starting to make significant force management changes. These are a mixed bag, however. Recent battlefield struggles by the heralded, French-trained 155th Mechanized Brigade appear to have led Zelensky to finally decree that newly trained soldiers will be sent to existing units, not new formations. On the other hand, the infantry deficit is so dire that highly trained specialists, like MiG-29 aviation technicians, are being rushed into the breach as infantry replacements. Despite condemnation of the practice by Zelensky, the Kyiv Independent recently reported that the practice continues unabated.
Weapons and materiel have mitigated Ukraine’s manpower deficit, but missiles and drones cannot replace the man in the mud. Ukraine’s vaunted “army of drones” has provided some relief as an economy of force instrument, enabling Ukrainians to kill large numbers of Russians from relative safety. Drones are not a solution to the infantry deficit, however. First-person view suicide drones may be terrifying, but they are essentially just one more munition, albeit one that can loiter, hunt, and be easily recorded for grisly propaganda after the fact. Infantrymen are still required to take and hold ground, as frontline commanders regularly attest.
Ukraine’s partners are belatedly acknowledging this enduring reality of land warfare. In September, Zelensky brought a victory plan to Washington that was little more than a shopping list and a request for more long-range missiles: Senior U.S. officials were “unimpressed.” After years of supplying Ukraine with weapons and minimizing any public discussion of manpower, in its lame-duck period the Biden administration finally called on Ukraine to lower its draft age to 18 in order to get more soldiers to the front.
The new Trump administration quickly echoed the outgoing Biden team in this belated manpower pressure. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz also called on Kyiv to lower its draft age and mobilize more men in order to stabilize the front line as a prelude to negotiations with Russia.
Some Ukrainian leaders are also calling for more comprehensive mobilization and lowering the draft age. Maj. Gen. Viktor Nazarov, a former advisor to Zaluzhnyi, has said a minimum draft age of 21 is necessary. Gen. Viktor Muzhenko, who commanded the Ukrainian military between 2014 to 2019, has expressed skepticism about the long-term impact of a lower draft age but has advocated for more thorough basic training and psychological preparedness for recruits.
Ukrainian Resistance
Zelensky is adamantly against lowering the draft age further, posting on X in December that “The priority should be saving lives, not drafting younger soldiers.” This is a sentiment broadly shared by his countrymen. In a pair of trips to Ukraine this past fall, I was told by many soldiers, even those on recruiting duty whose daily mission is to enlist more men, that Ukraine ought to spare its youngest citizens from fighting. Widespread awareness of the dangers of the front and the inadequacy of Ukrainian military training have further entrenched resistance to drafting teenagers and those in their early twenties.
This resistance has intermittently turned into violent pushback against the Ukrainian soldiers who round up draft-eligible young men. Earlier this month, four attacks in five days, two of them fatal bombings, targeted recruiters around the country. Ukraine’s security services have described these incidents as Russian-organized terrorism. But previous skirmishes, some escalating to murder, appear to be organic Ukrainian reactions to forcible conscription.
In place of a lowered draft age, on Feb. 10 Ukraine announced new “special contracts” for volunteers aged 18 to 24. Those signing up will receive annual salaries of 1 million hryvnia ($24,000), 0 percent interest mortgage rates, free higher education, and the ability to travel abroad after service. Most significantly, these soldiers will only be required to serve for one year. But young Ukrainians appear to be skeptical the state will abide by the terms of these new contracts. It remains to be seen whether this new package of inducements will significantly alter the size and composition of Ukrainian infantry units.
Demographic realities drive much of the resistance to forcing Ukraine’s best potential soldiers to serve. An enormous post-Soviet birth dearth has left 20–24 year-olds the smallest age cohort in Ukraine: 2001 saw the lowest birth rate in Ukrainian history. Ukraine currently has the lowest birth rate in Europe, with three times as many deaths as births in 2024. There were about 50 million Ukrainian citizens upon independence in 1991. Today, there may be as few as 26 or 27 million people within Ukrainian-controlled territory. Many Ukrainians fear that if the young are not spared from the war, their country has no future.
These demographic constraints, however, only tell part of the story. There are about 1.5 million 18-to-25 year-old men in Ukraine. Thirty or so battalions, about 30,000 young men, could be enough to stabilize the front line, according to military analyst Michael Kofman. And of that 30,000, only a small percentage will be killed in action. A few thousand young men are not going to be the difference between demographic survival and extinction. And if this war is truly for the survival of an independent Ukraine, then demographic concerns should ultimately be secondary. The priority should be stopping Russia, then worrying about families and fertility.
Conclusion
All of this is not to say that longer-ranged Western missiles do not have real utility for Ukraine, nor that they should necessarily be withheld. ATACMS and systems like British and French Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles enable disruption of Russian command centers and logistics nodes. But the impact of deep strike weapons on Ukraine’s war is limited, while insufficient military manpower is likely to be the most important factor in the war’s outcome.
Fully mobilizing Ukraine’s population will demand substantial sacrifices across the society. That this request has yet to be made during an existential war speaks to how politically challenging it is. Forcing change in a military, let alone in the political system and society that sustains it, is very hard. It is far harder than green-lighting weapons transfers, no matter how expensive or impressive those may look on paper.
Those American weapons may not even be coming for much longer. In the wake of Vice President J.D. Vance’s broadside against Europe in Munich and with Washington negotiating directly with Moscow, future American support to Ukraine is more uncertain than it has ever been. Trump may well negotiate directly with Putin, cutting Ukraine out of any say in its own future. If Ukraine is to salvage its deteriorating military situation and end the war on reasonably favorable terms, it is running out of time to get more and better men into uniform. The deep strike distraction has allowed Ukraine to avoid grappling with its manpower deficit and dysfunction for far too long.
Gil Barndollar is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a senior research fellow at the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship, where he studies military manpower and mobilization.
Image: Ukrainian Ministry of Defense via ArmyInform.
