Introduction
For decades, Western strategic thought assumed war “intended to maximize the capture of enemy territory” had given way to control won through “hearts and minds”. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine challenged that assumption; consecutive British Chiefs of the General Staff have since revisited a more traditional proposition: that territorial control remains the decisive factor in war.
In 2022, General Sir Patrick Sanders observed that “you can’t cyber your way across a river.” His successor, General Sir Roly Walker, echoed this on 23 June of this year (2026), arguing that only land forces can establish and sustain territorial control until a political settlement is reached.
These claims sit within a long tradition of military theory, mirroring J.C. Wylie’s 1967 observation that “the ultimate determinant in war is the man on the scene with the gun. This man is the final power in war. He is control. He determines who wins.” But recognising the decisive role of the land domain in controlling territory is one thing; actually achieving it is quite another.
Drawing on observations from Ukraine, this article argues that four enduring principles determine territorial control: Mass, Survivability, Lethality, and the Will. Each reinforces the next, while continual adaptation sustains the system as the battlespace evolves. Insufficiency in any one undermines the effectiveness of the rest.
The modern battlespace
Wylie’s “man on the scene” still determines political control in war; yet today, reaching the scene, and surviving long enough to turn presence into control, is dramatically more difficult.
The battle for Vuhledar, a small mining town in the Donetsk oblast, demonstrates the challenge. In April 2022, Russian forces stood roughly 2.7 kilometres away. Two years later, having reportedly lost a 5,000-strong elite naval infantry brigade and over 100 armoured vehicles, they had advanced barely 350 metres (author’s calculation). Vuhledar eventually fell in October 2024 through gradual encirclement, with Russian forces holding a massive nine-to-one manpower advantage over the defenders.
As Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) argued, Ukraine highlights that achieving surprise is almost impossible and concentrating forces invites destruction. Forces are detected earlier, tracked for longer, and engaged faster. The battlespace is consequently more fragmented, dispersion has increased, manoeuvre is slower, and concealment and survival are difficult.
If territorial control remains the political objective of war, land forces must therefore solve a fundamental problem: how to survive long enough to establish and sustain it.
Principle 1: Mass
If territorial control requires forces to remain physically present, they must survive the effects of attrition long enough to be lethal and to matter politically. This requires mass.
Mass is best understood as the combination of manpower, equipment, munitions, logistical capacity, and industrial depth. What it generates is not necessarily battlespace superiority, but rather sufficiency - enough combat power to absorb losses, sustain the expenditure of munitions, replace destroyed equipment and continue fighting.
Here, no amount of technological sophistication can compensate indefinitely for insufficient depth. While precision can reduce the rate at which combat power is consumed, it cannot eliminate consumption altogether.
By some estimates, Russia has suffered 1.4 million battlefield casualties since 2022, produced an estimated 7 million artillery, mortar, tank and rocket rounds in 2025 alone, and still continues to fight. Traditional mass may be the wrong metric for combat effectiveness, but it is the right one for sustaining operations measured in years rather than weeks.
Principle 2: Survivability
If mass provides depth, survivability determines how much of that depth reaches the fight intact and stays there long enough to matter. In a transparent battlespace, survivability is less a fixed property of any system than a continuous process of adaptation: forces that fail to adapt fast enough to a rapidly changing battlespace are selected out.
This is evident in Ukraine’s ‘ceaselessly evolving’ Electronic Warfare (EW) contest, where drone frequencies, software, and countermeasures change continuously, rendering advantages fleeting. Survivability therefore requires rapid adaptation alongside core capabilities such as Counter-UAS, Ground-Based Air Defence (GBAD), and EW, and the fundamentals of dispersal, fortification and manoeuvre.
Yet survivability is not just defensive – it is also contingent on sensing, disrupting, and degrading the adversary, suppressing enemy positions and creating the conditions for manoeuvre. This requires integrated targeting networks for battlespace awareness and faster decision-making, coupled with deep fires to hold more of the adversary’s assets at risk, at range. This speaks to the next principle: lethality.
Principle 3: Lethality
Lethality – the ‘capability and capacity to destroy’ – is increasingly treated as a more meaningful measure of combat power than headcount alone. Its value lies both in the destruction it delivers and in the freedom of manoeuvre it restores, creating temporary windows for ground forces to push forward and seize territory.
Lethality can also offer asymmetric advantage. Rather than targeting an adversary’s mass, an outmanned and outgunned force can degrade an adversary’s system by targeting its decision-making. As Major General Neil Budd, commander of the British Army’s Deep Recce Strike Brigade, put it, an adversary stripped of its “eyes and the brain” is left with guns that are little more than “dumb lumps of metal.”
Yet such advantages fade fast unless targeting methods adapt quickly and the force retains the ability to deliver a sufficient volume of fires. Britain’s 155mm artillery capability illustrates this - having donated its AS90 fleet to Ukraine, it now rests on just fourteen Archer guns – likely insufficient against a numerically superior, dispersed adversary.
Principle 4: Will
The final principle is the will. Ukraine has shown the extraordinary human cost of major war, with combined casualties on both sides now in the millions. The war has been characterised by bitter engagements over small areas of land, with both sides willing to put soldiers in harm’s way to capture and hold it.
Ukraine is a warning against the myth of a clean war. Warfare remains slow, attritional and highly positional, despite sophisticated technology and continuous adaptation. Within this context, the will to accept casualties is likely to be critical to establishing and sustaining territorial control until a political settlement is reached. Technology, while necessary, is by no means sufficient.
Clausewitz put it aptly when he wrote that it would be a grave error to assume there is “some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed.” (p.75) And this presents a difficult cultural challenge for any nation more accustomed to fighting wars of choice than of necessity.
The Enduring Logic of Land Warfare
Ukraine has not overturned the enduring political logic of warfare. Wylie, Sanders and Walker are correct that territorial control creates the conditions for political settlement, and this requires soldiers on the ground.
What Ukraine has exposed is the extraordinary cost of placing and sustaining that soldier there. Persistent transparency, industrial-scale attrition, and precision strike mean territorial control cannot be achieved through technological superiority alone.
It requires sufficient mass to generate depth, survivability to remain in the fight, lethality to degrade the adversary and create room for manoeuvre, and the collective will to sustain all three despite mounting losses. Remove any of these principles, and the entire system begins to fail.
