The Battles of the Donetsk Airport (May 2014 – Jan 2015)

Just published by The Institute of Land Warfare is a paper by Major Amos C. Fox, U.S. Army called “Cyborgs at Little Stalingrad”: A Brief History of the Battle of the Donetsk Airport. It is not long (16 pages) and definitely worth a read.

A few highlights:

  1. “Contrary to conventional narratives on the primacy and high-mindedness of maneuver warfare and the crippling effects of electronic and cyber warfare, positional warfare and sieges are the zeitgeist of contemporary war.” (page 12)
  2. “Positional battles and sieges have also commanded the counter-Islamic State campaigns in Iraq, Syria and the Philippines.” (page 12)
  3. “These battles are important because they remind students of war that rugged, land-centric combat arms warfare has not been thrown into the dustbin of history but is instead alive and well.” (page 16)
  4. He does document the downing of 10 Ukrainian aircraft in May – July 2014 (pages 11-12), but leaves out any reference to the downing of Flight MH17 on 17 July 2014 over Eastern Ukraine, killing 298 civilians.

To quote from the last paragraph of my book, War by Numbers (page 328):

The post-Cold War world appears to be world of many small conflicts…the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 proved that the United States is not immune to attack and that we do have to remain engaged with the rest of the world to some degree. Certainly U.S. armed forces will be part of that engagement, and they will be called upon to fight a range of wars, from drone strikes and special operations to full-scale guerrilla wars and conventional campaigns. All must be addressed and planned for.

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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