Russia has hit on an “offensive triangle” of tactics that are forcing Ukraine to lose ground.
The key to reviving Russian airpower has been a surprisingly low-tech weapon: glide bombs.
Glide bombs shatter the fortified positions Ukraine’s soldiers need to stop Russian assault troops.
As the Ukraine war enters its fourth year, Russia seems to have found a winning combination to wear down Ukraine’s army. This “offensive triangle,” as British military analysts term it, is a triple threat of infantry, drones and glide bombs that Ukraine can’t stop. This also raises the question of whether NATO should fear this lethal trifecta. So far, these Russian tactics haven’t produced any decisive battlefield breakthroughs, though they are producing small, steady — and costly — gains. What they are accomplishing is relentlessly wearing down Ukrainian troops and morale by placing them in an impossible position, made more difficult by the Trump administration’s freezing of US arms shipments and intelligence. The strategy has three components.
“First, the AFRF [Russian armed forces] continue to pin down Ukrainian ground forces on the line of contact with infantry and mechanized forces,” according to a study by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank; Ukraine’s frontlines stretch roughly 600 miles, favoring Russia’s numerical superiority. “Second, they prevent maneuver and inflict attrition with first-person view drones (FPVs), Lancet drones and artillery firing both high-explosive shells and scatterable mines.” “Third, the AFRF has increased its use of UMPK glide bombs against Ukrainian forces who are holding defensive positions,” RUSI said, referring to kits that add fins and navigation guidance to dumb bombs. This “creates a competing dilemma: should the AFU [Ukrainian armed forces] hold and invest in static defensive positions to reduce attrition from FPVs and drone-enabled artillery, or retain mobility to avoid destruction from glide bomb strikes, which have the explosive yield to demolish or bury even well-prepared fortifications?”
What’s really new in this equation is the advent of the Russian air force as a significant factor in the war. Despite Moscow’s initial hopes that airpower would be decisive in the ground campaign, the reality has been that Russian battlefield airpower has been largely neutralized by Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles. Russian planes have tended to remain well behind the front line, safely out of range of Ukrainian air defenses. The key to reviving Russian airpower has been a surprisingly low-tech weapon. Glide bombs are old-fashioned iron bombs equipped with wings and GPS guidance via the UMPK kit, converting them into cheap smart bombs. The US has been using the Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, for 25 years, including extensive use in the Middle East.
Russia began dropping glide bombs in 2023, which soon surprised Western observers with their power. “While these were initially considered individually dangerous but not game-changing, or even a sign of Russian desperation, their mass-producibility rapidly proved a key advantage,” RUSI noted. The Russian air force “has been able to launch glide bombs across the frontline with the crewed launch aircraft remaining at a safe distance of between 30 and 90 kilometers [19 to 56 miles], depending on the size and thus the glide efficiency of the bomb.” What Russian glide bombs lack in accuracy compared to their Western counterparts, they make up in explosive power. JDAMs range from 500 to 2,000 pounds: Russia’s FAB-1500 weighs around 3,500 pounds, and the FAB-3000 more than 6,000 pounds.
These bombs pack so much explosive that even a near miss by FABs will destroy Ukrainian trenches and bunkers. “The rise in UMPK glide bomb production from 40,000 units in 2024 to 70,000 units anticipated in 2025, has significantly increased the number of Ukrainian troops killed during defensive operations,” said RUSI. “This has had numerous knock-on effects for the different arms and services, as they have been pushed to completely avoid observation of their positions, to disperse or seek concealment underground, and to rely on uncrewed or autonomous systems to keep and kill the enemy at arm’s length.” What Russia is really doing is what it should have done since the war began in February 2022: using basic combined arms tactics such as synchronizing ground attacks and airpower, which has been standard since World War II. Despite Russia using expendable assault troops, drones and glide bombs for most of the war, Ukraine has been able to master the threat well enough to fight on, despite being outnumbered and outgunned. But now that Russia is using these three types of troops and weapons in a more synchronized fashion, Ukraine is having difficulty coping.
However, Russia’s offensive triangle is no panacea for flaws in the Russian military, such as rigid command and control. Nor has it led to a catastrophic breakthrough for Russia, one of the world’s top arms makers with a population nearly four times larger than Ukraine, which has relied on fortifications, drones and long-range weapons to exact a heavy toll on Russia’s advancing troops. Ukraine’s “approach to defense in depth and to imposing attrition at longer range has made it very costly for Russian forces to make gains,” RUSI said. “This has limited Russia’s ability to build up tempo or to exploit breaches in defense lines. While Russia has found an effective formula for inflicting heavy casualties on Ukraine, it has not found a successful formula for breaching defenses without taking massive losses in equipment and personnel.”
Does NATO need to worry about the offensive triangle? Western experts already argue that NATO should learn from Russia’s air campaign, and amass a huge stockpile of cheap glide bombs. On the other hand, Russia enjoys some advantages over Ukraine that may not apply to a conflict in NATO. In particular, Russian planes can safely lob glide bombs from 60 miles behind the front line because Ukraine lacks a large air force and long-range air-to-air missiles. NATO air forces are much more powerful in air combat, suppressing enemy air defenses, and striking troops and supply lines.
