Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has enabled evaluation of its strategy against the popular US ‘Five Rings’ theory. Alexander Mladenov examines how well the missile-dominated effort has contributed to Moscow’s integrated war campaign
USAF Col John Warden III’s ‘Five Rings’ theory, which underpinned the decisive and highly successful air campaign during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, tends to describe an adversary country as a system with a series of concentric rings. The leadership is at its centre and the subsequent rings contain organic essentials, infrastructure, population and fielded forces – that are tasked with protecting the inner rings.
Col Warden’s strategic approach calls for the use of airpower to jump over the outer rings to strike at the centre, targeting the leadership or command-and-control (C2) function, which he says serves as the brain of the organism – the so-called ‘decapitation attack’.
His proposal is to organise the attack on the concentric rings from the ‘inside out’ in a bid to disable the most important centres of gravity first and then continuing to do the job outward to less important rings. Centres of gravity are key targets or nodes that, if destroyed or disabled, would result in a significant impac…
