Somewhere behind the Novodarivka breach point in June 2023, Ukrainian armored formations sat staged and ready. The ammunition was there. The fuel was there. The original concept of operations called for 12 brigades to push through roughly 30 kilometers of frontage, isolate Tokmak within days, and drive south before Russian forces could consolidate. They never moved. The engineers could not open the lane. Without the lane, none of the rest of it mattered.
Against prepared defenses, breaching and gap-crossing capacity can decide whether a land force ever gets to test the rest of its campaign design. Much of the serious work on this problem has likely been done in classified wargames, exercises, and operational analysis, and much of that work may not be public for decades. Still, the open record is strong enough to make one point: When the breach fails, the larger campaign can stall before ammunition stockpiles, fuel plans, or reserve calculations decide the outcome.
The Breach Can Halt the Campaign
Campaign plans often emphasize transportation, logistics support, and munitions because those factors are central to feasibility and can be expressed in concrete planning terms. Campaign plans should emphasize those factors, but a land force can stall earlier. If a land force cannot open a lane through a prepared obstacle belt or sustain a crossing under fire, the follow-on force never gets to the part of the plan where those other calculations matter.
The public record on Ukraine already points in that direction. A recent Army article on the 2023 counteroffensive argues that the combined arms breach sat at the core of the campaign’s maneuver-attrition debate. A Royal United Services Institute study and a War on the Rocks essay agree. The operation could not progress on schedule once the breach failed.
This means enough is already visible to justify a sharper planning question. Campaign designers should ask what happens if breaching assets are disabled, the first lane does not open, or the crossing cannot be sustained. They should ask that before they become absorbed with what happens after the force passes through.
What Ukraine Shows
Before the counteroffensive began, Ukraine’s Orikhiv-Tokmak concept envisioned 12 brigades breaking through 30 kilometers of frontage, isolating Tokmak within seven days, and then driving south toward Melitopol. Russian defenses on that axis were deep, layered, and visible in the open source well before the assault. Tempo depended on a successful breach.
At Novodarivka, the Royal United Services Institute’s report describes the breaching company committing to the lane, deviating under pressure, then being immobilized by mine strikes in succession while Russian fires ranged onto the column. The same report notes that Russian forces regarded the early fighting around Novodarivka and Rivnopil as successful because the losses they inflicted degraded the reach of the Ukrainian advance. That deserves acknowledgment. Russian forces built a coherent defensive problem and executed it well.
Engineer losses alone do not explain the failure of the 2023 counteroffensive. Ukrainian troops did not implement the original plan as designed. Equipment arrived late, training time was short, and Russia integrated observation, fires, aviation, and obstacles effectively. Effort also spread across multiple axes. The broader explanation, however, strengthens the central point. Once the breach failed, the larger campaign could not unfold on the timetable that gave the original plan its promise.
Russia’s failed attempt to cross the Siverskyi Donets river in May 2022 shows the same logic from the other side. Russian forces lost an entire battalion tactical group at the river. Their fuel, ammunition, and manpower elsewhere did not matter because the force at the crossing never secured the opening that would have let those other resources count.
A breach or crossing is not a mere engineering drill. Rather, it is a combined arms operation that requires reconnaissance to find the site, fires to suppress defenders, obscuration to reduce enemy observation, security forces to protect the lane, engineers to reduce obstacles or emplace the crossing, traffic control to move units through in order, and follow-on operations to keep the opening from collapsing. When those actions fall out of sequence, the crossing can stall even when the larger force remains intact.
A Historical Pattern
The seizure of the Remagen bridge in March 1945 gave Allied forces a crossing that preserved momentum into Germany. The crossing held, engineer effort sustained it under pressure, and Allied forces pushed on toward the Ruhr. This opening allowed the rest of the campaign to keep moving.
The official British account of Operation Market Garden shows the opposite problem. XXX Corps depended on a narrow corridor and a sequence of crossings to reach the airborne forces at Arnhem before the timetable collapsed. The operation failed for several reasons, including intelligence shortcomings and strong German resistance, but damaged crossings and delay along the route narrowed what the ground force could still achieve. Every campaign does not rise or fall on a bridge. Rather, a breach or crossing can decide whether a campaign ever reaches the phase the broader plan was built around.
What Planners Should Do
This has direct implications for campaign design in U.S. European Command and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Planners should treat breaching and crossing tasks as explicit campaign variables inside operations, not quiet assumptions buried in graphics and sustainment tables.
That means asking concrete questions. How many lanes must be opened, and how quickly, for the operation to keep moving? How many breaching vehicles, bridging assets, smoke systems, route-control teams, and engineer command nodes can be lost in the first action before the plan begins to stall? How much redundancy exists if the first breach site fails? What opportunities open if the lane is cleared quickly and the exploitation force passes through on schedule?
The resourcing implication follows. The combined arms breach cannot remain a doctrinal ritual assumed away in campaign design. It must sit near the center of force development, readiness, and training. This is a campaign design issue, not a narrow engineer issue. A 2025 Government Accountability Office report found that none of the Army vehicles it reviewed met the Army’s 90 percent availability goal in fiscal year 2024. At the same time, the Army’s 2024 Force Structure Transformation white paper and the 2025 Army Transformation and Acquisition Reform memorandum show a service under pressure to rebalance formations, cut legacy systems, and reassess prepositioned stocks. Plans that assume breach-and-crossing capacity the force cannot generate, sustain, or regenerate are accepting serious early risk.
Counterargument
The strongest objection is straightforward: A report on the 2023 offensive found that Ukraine lacked the personnel, ammunition, air support, and enabling systems needed for offensive operations against a well-organized echeloned defense, while a summary of that report notes equipment shortfalls, public signaling and leaked information, and overoptimistic planning. Ukraine also attacked on three axes, spreading combat power across Orikhiv, Velyka Novosilka, and Bakhmut. Much of the U.S. and Joint Force’s work on this problem is also classified, so public commentary should be careful about claiming the Army or the Department of Defense has ignored it.
That objection deserves weight. Public sources cannot see the full body of classified wargames and joint analysis on munitions, breaching, and campaign design. They can still show a repeated public lesson. Against prepared defenses, the side that cannot reduce obstacles and sustain crossings under fire often loses the timetable that made the rest of its campaign possible. The breach does not explain everything. It can still decide what becomes possible next.
A related objection is the assumption that U.S. forces are better trained, better equipped, and better organized than Ukrainian forces were in 2023. That may prove true, but it remains an assumption until tested against a prepared opponent with dense obstacles, integrated fires, and real combat experience. The Army’s combat training centers are valuable. They are not a Russian field army that has spent years fighting this exact problem in Ukraine.
Conclusion
The public record already says enough to act. A campaign can fail at the obstacle belt or the river line before the rest of the plan is ever tested. When that happens, the offensive does not reach the phase where the best fuel plan, the deepest magazine, or the largest reserve can matter.
The practical lesson is straightforward: treat breaching and crossing capacity as explicit campaign variables. Wargame their loss rates, measure their redundancy, and test whether the exploitation concept survives disruption at the breach or crossing site. If it does not, then the plan’s culminating point may arrive far earlier than the logistics estimate suggests.
Michael Carvelli is an Army officer and graduate of the School of Advanced Military Studies. He has written on large-scale combat operations for Military Review and Parameters.
The views expressed are his own and do not represent those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on The Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: Army Inform
