One of the primary aspirations of professional militaries is to field a force capable of delivering victory while circumventing attritional warfare. Attritional warfare develops when neither side is able to achieve a decisive advantage. Unless new capabilities or terrain shift the logic of a fight, attritional warfare ends when one side exhausts its supply of people, materiel or morale. This is the grim state of the current fighting in Ukraine.
For Russia, the low morale and poor cohesion of its infantry prevents its army from undertaking large offensive manoeuvres without taking unsustainable levels of losses in both personnel and equipment. So far, it has lost about a quarter of its armoured forces in Ukraine.
