The economist has a pretty obvious bias yeah
but just look at it from the known knowns / known unknowns perspective
We know this was a fairly rapid fall of the city, we know Russia had some unexpected flanking maneuvers like the pipeline commandos. We know Sudzha is now back in Russian hands, we know there has been a huge amount of death in the city. We know Ukraine is absolutely full of shit when they claim their operations are unaffected / have full freedom to maneuver. We know they've bungled previous withdrawals, with huge amounts of people killed/captured in disorganized routs.
We don't know how organized and effective this retreat was. We don't know how many POWs were taken, how many were executed in war crimes. We don't know how many were killed on the retreat routes, we don't know how heavy the losses during the occupation and siege were on either side.
Our small slices of evidence show videos of bodies and destroyed buildings everywhere, many ukrainian military outfit corpses. We have numerous videos of POWs captured, some of POWs executed. We've got some videos of a chaotic retreat in the middle of the night. And a huge amount of video of abandoned ukrainian (ie american made) equipment, most of it destroyed, some of it captured in working order. Tanks, armor, etc.
We can't say for sure what all this adds up to. We know about horrible losses in some previous retreats like Avdiivka. We have no way to know what this one looks like
A blackwater speech by eric prince gave some insights into what military tech changes are occurring and how Russia has adapted.
One thing he said stuck out, how some stocks of prebuilt systems like Copperheads and Javelins have basically become worthless due to EW. We've invested heavily in EW countermeasures for systems like new drones, but we've got stockpiles of tens of thousands of missiles that can't hit the broad side of a russian barn anymore due to jamming. This is think is also a very abstract lens issue with the american military going into the mid 21st century. Everyone has predicted how major carrier strike groups would be bigger targets than force projection, how drones would be the future. But we're seeing just how useless outdated tech can be, and all the huge production of the past 20 years might amount to nothing at all. At least we kept pawning it off on allies and proxy warriors because this shit clearly wouldn't help in a major armed conflict.
maybe we can produce updated, laser guided or AI guided ATGMs in the future, but its not like you can just slap a converter kit on a javelin and turn it into a smart bomb
Yeah this is just what conflicts will be from now on 24 hour surveillance of the contact line, brutal tench warfare with artillery and constant fpv drone attacks.
If they could put a competent AI on smaller missile, they would probably put them on anti air missiles first to completely defeat 'Stealth' aircraft, since they would no longer need a lock, just get the missile to where it can identify the aircraft itself.