Some of the lessons learned so far from the war in Ukraine have come into play as the Army considers how it will fight in the Indo-Pacific, Army Undersecretary Gabe Camarillo said.

In a discussion Oct. 28 hosted by Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, Camarillo said he hesitates to draw conclusions from a war that is still underway, but “given that grain of salt, I would say there are a couple of things that have directly impacted how we’re thinking about the way the Army fights.”

Among the top observations is the contested, congested electromagnetic spectrum, which Camarillo likened to electromagnetic spectrum trench warfare.

Using the Army’s 20-year counterinsurgency fight as an example, he pointed to the relatively permissive environment where antenna farms were erected in static positions and maintained for years along with tactical operations centers.

“In those environments it didn’t matter if we were visible to the enemy from the electromagnetic spectrum because, frankly, our ability to survive in that environment was not a question,” Camarillo said, noting that the same environment in Ukraine is “highly contested and one that has lethal implications on the battlefield.”

What it means for the Army is big changes in everything from division-level command-and-control down to the tactical radios soldiers use, to encryption on the battlefield, to dismounted operations.

“We have to ensure we can hide in plain sight,” he said, adding that the Army “is shifting the way we’re thinking about investments and the kinds of capabilities that we would have to have in the future.”

The threat posed by unmanned aircraft systems also has been a huge shift. “No one could have predicted the ease with which both commercial and relatively easy to manufacture systems would change the battlefield,” Camarillo said. “It is a persistent source of intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance for both sides, a way to deliver lethal effects on the battlefield.”

The aerial threat, he said, has had a major impact on the mission and the ability to defend against the deadly threats “is something that Ukrainians have had to be very inventive in trying to come up with new ways to change that dynamic.”

Logistics also will be a highly contested area of operations, Camarillo said, pointing out that much has been learned by observing how the Russians struggled with its own supply lines after their initial invasion in February 2022 and what it did to their ability to move their formations at a steady pace.

“It was impacted by logistics, and that was something the Ukrainians were very effective at targeting very early in the conflict,” Camarillo said. “The ability to ensure that our own supply lines in the future are guarded against similar vulnerabilities is something we’re spending a lot of time talking about.”