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 The defeat of the initial Russian invasion plan is a rather interesting episode in military history -- not because it involves something new, but, on the contrary, because it confirms a whole set of hoary cliches about strategy and tactics -- cliches which, for some militaries, have to be relearned the hard way in every war.

The first and oldest of these is the maxim of the classical Chinese military thinker Sun Tzu: "Know your enemy." Underlying all Russian military failures in the war so far is their total underestimation of the determination and skill of the Ukrainian defense. The Russian military appears to have based its assessment of the Ukrainian military on its miserable condition back in 2014 -- despite the fact that one of the motives for this invasion was precisely because the United States had been doing so much to strengthen the Ukrainian armed forces. It would seem that once Putin and his immediate circle had decided for war, any intelligence casting doubt on this decision was simply excluded or ignored (as with the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003).

As a result, the planners of the Russian invasion did not understand or apply Napoleon's maxim, that "in war, the moral factor compared to the physical is as three to one." Gen. Bonaparte was of course exaggerating for rhetorical effect. The French armies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars would not have won without superb modern artillery, and the Ukrainians would not have been able to resist the Russian army without NATO-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. 

At the same time, it is clear that superior Ukrainian morale -- a characteristic of men fighting to defend their homes -- has played an important part; and this is something that Russians themselves should understand from their own history in World War II when the fighting spirit of the Soviet army increased the further the Nazis penetrated into Russia and Ukraine. 

The remarkable number of senior Russian officers who have reportedly been killed in action in this most recent war testifies to their personal courage and devotion to duty, but the fact that they felt compelled to lead and inspire their soldiers from the front is a pretty clear indication of serious morale problems in the Russian rank and file.

Underestimation of the enemy led to classic errors of military strategy: inadequate forces for the task they were given, and dispersal of those forces in the face of the enemy. The Russian attacked a country of 233,000 square miles from six different directions with fewer than 200,000 men --and, in consequence, failed almost everywhere. This emphasizes the old lesson, that any successful general in history could have taught: relative weaponry and airpower are of course important, but the concentration of mass at a particular point is also still key to victory. 

"Get there firstest with the mostest," as the Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest supposedly (perhaps apocryphally) said during the American Civil War.

Finally, there is the role of cities and urban warfare. As global urbanization grows and grows, this will become a defining feature of future wars. What has above all held up the Russian advance has been the readiness of Ukrainian defenders -- like the Chechens in Grozny -- to hold out in the urban areas that spread across much of eastern and southern Ukraine. The areas and populations involved dwarf the number of Russian attackers. 

Urban warfare has counteracted Russia's superiority in armor and airpower and maximized the effectiveness of Ukrainian infantry weapons. This has forced the Russians (like the Americans in Mogadishu, Fallujah, Hue, and elsewhere) to resort to massive firepower to dislodge the defenders, and in consequence, to suffer severe political damage from the resulting destruction and civilian casualties.

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