A Strategic Air Campaign For Ukraine: Crushing Russian Mobility Through Oil and Rail Attacks

And The Ukrainians Might Already Have Understood This

Hello All,

Having discussed the idea of what a strategic air campaign by Ukraine against Russia needs to consider in this first piece—I thought I might propose a campaign that should work for the Ukrainians (and one which they might already have started by the way).

Russian Oil Tanks Burning in February 2025: The Ukrainians Seem To Be Doing Such Attacks Now Systematically.

And I hope you do not mind if I start with being self-referential—but as I’ve discussed strategic bombing/long-range attacks for much of my career, its easier instead of repeating everything, to give you some excerpts of earlier writings.

For instance, I have discussed strategic bombing in World War II extensively, most notably in How the War was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge 2015) and now more recently in War and Power: Who Wins Wars and Why (Penguin/Basic Books 2025). What I argue in both is that its important to look at a war as a competition between productive systems, and shutting down or damaging those systems matters far more than the battles we like to see (wrongly imho) as being decisive. In World War II, for instance, while people love to focus on D-Day or Operation Bagration in 1944, far more damage was being done to Germany’s ability to continue the war through the combined air attacks on German oil/fuel and railway capacity. Here is a section from Chapter 9: The War in Europe in 1944, where I outline what happened.

I develop such ideas more generally in War and Power. In particular that war needs to be understood as a competition between force regeneration systems more than anything else (as opposed to a battle between the forces that exist when a war starts). Here is a section from Chapter 9, Starting Versus Sustaining, which discusses this idea vis a vis the Russo-Ukraine War.

This idea that you should look at an enemy not as a military—but as a system that needs to be deconstructed and defeated, represents why I have throughout the Russo-Ukraine War argued that Ukraine needed to be supported with long-range weapons—so that they could engage Russia far more efficiently. In March 2023, when people were saying Ukraine did not need long-range weapons, but should be armed to attack the Russian army directly, I argued in The Atlantic that they had no idea how wars were actually won or lost.

Here is a short section from that piece.

Far more effective is to weaken your opponent’s forces before they get to the battlefield. You can limit what military infrastructure they’re able to build, make sure what they do build is substandard, hamper their ability to train troops to operate what they build, and hinder them from deploying their resources to the battlefield. These steps are doubly effective in that they save your own forces while degrading the other side’s. Over the past two centuries, the powers that have emerged triumphant have been the ones that not only fought the enemy on the battlefield but also targeted its production and deployment systems—as the Union did by controlling the waters around the Confederacy during the Civil War and as the United States and Britain did from the air against Nazi Germany.

In light of such dynamics, the manner in which the West is supporting Ukraine’s war effort is deeply frustrating. Though NATO countries have a variety of systems that can target Russian forces deep behind their lines, recent aid has been overwhelmingly geared toward preparing Ukraine to make direct assaults against the Russian army. The most widely discussed forms of equipment—such as Leopard 2 tanks, Bradley armored personnel carriers, and even Archer long-range artillery—are not the kinds of systems that can disrupt or degrade Russian forces far behind the front lines.

In short, Ukraine is being made to fight the war the hard way, not the smart way.

Sadly, however, Ukraine was deprived of the ability to strike Russia at range consistently and effectively—that is possibly until now. War tends to find a way, and while Ukraine’s partners tried to limit Ukraine’s ability to strike Russia strategically at range, the Ukrainians were determined to build up that capacity for themselves. In just the last few weeks, even before the arrival of the much discussed Flamingo FP-5 cruise missiles, the Ukrainians have stepped up their strategic air campaign in such a way that it seems that they have understood the lessons of World War II—and are trying to bring those lessons home to Russia today.

A Strategic Air Campaign For Ukraine: The Lower Priorities