Ukraine: comic book nostrums

By Richard North - December 12, 2022

Such is the power of prestige that the Wall Street Journal has given over an opinion slot to none other than a certain Boris Johnson to write about how to end the war in Ukraine.

Right at the end of the piece, obviously written for US audiences, there is a one-line description of the man which tells us that he “served as British prime minister, 2019-22”. One wonders though, how well the piece might have been perceived had it added: “thrown out of office after losing the confidence of his own party”.

In a very real sense, this is an extraordinary move. A rough equivalent might have been to have ex-president Nixon in 1974, shortly after he had resigned from office, writing for the Financial Times on how to end the VietNam war. I guess the Americans at the time might not have been too amused.

Headed, “For a Quicker End to the Russia War, Step Up Aid to Ukraine”, even in its own terms, without the veneer of respectability given to it by a former prime minister, the piece is inchoate, advancing the thesis that, “No negotiated settlement is possible, and the longer the conflict goes on, the costlier it becomes”.

When heading and sub-heading are linked, what we are getting from the Oaf is that in order to bring the war quickly to an end we should be flooding Ukraine with military aid now, despite the cost. If we don’t, he suggests, and we trickle aid to the embattled country, it will prolong the war and cost us as much in the longer term.

One could of course argue that if that was a persuasive thesis, it should have been applied earlier in the war when the Ukraine Armed forces were crying out for long-range artillery which the UK was unable to provide.

But what had gone almost entirely unrecorded by the British media was the fact that the UK government had let its own capability drop to such a dangerously low level that it simply had nothing to provide, ending up buying obsolescent Belgian guns to give to the Ukrainians for want of more effective weapons.

This is something partially, and superficially, addressed by the Telegraph which writes up an uncritical review of the WSJ piece under heading, “Boris Johnson: Give Ukraine long-range weapons to end war”. This has him arguing that Ukraine should be given the long-range ATACMS missile. But since this is an American weapon, it isn’t in the gift of the UK to release so we have, effectively, a failed British prime minister telling the United States what to do.

Returning to the WSJ piece, Johnson starts off by writing, “I don’t care how often I have to say it: The war in Ukraine can end only with Vladimir Putin’s defeat”, adding: “Russian forces must be pushed back to the de facto boundary of Feb. 24”.

Even here, there is much which is arguable. There is a broad tendency to personalise this war, fronting Putin as the primary antagonist. And in this case, there is superficially a certain logic in calling for Putin’s defeat.

It would be a rash prediction, though, to argue that the removal/defeat of the Russian president would necessarily end the war. Such is the opacity of the power structures in Russia that it could easily be the case that any successor could be more bellicose, escalating the war to terrifying levels.

As to pushing the Russian forces back to the “de facto boundary of Feb. 24”, is under present circumstances, an extremely ambitious aim. Given the enormously costly attritional warfare in Bakhmut, where the two sides have fought themselves to a standstill in conditions akin to World War I, there is no good reason to assert that this is even possible.

In any event, last I heard, Zelensky’s declared objective was to recover all former Ukrainian territories standing in 2014, before the start of the war, including the whole of Donbass and Crimea. This is probably even less attainable than the more limited aims that Johnson sets out, but I have not seen any indications that Zelensky has rowed back from his ambition.

This notwithstanding, Johnson argues for the war to end in 2023, despite Putin recently claiming that the war was a “long process”, while giving no indication that he was willing to seek a negotiated end.

To achieve this military miracle, as we see from the Telegraph report, Johnson wants Ukraine to be sent ATACMS, to enable Russian missile launch sites to be targeted. But, to retake ground quickly, he argues that the Ukrainians need “armoured cars and tanks”.

I don’t know which war comics this fool has been reading, but he is obviously not sufficiently self-aware to realise how utterly trite this comment is. But then, self-awareness was never Johnson’s strong point.

The point, of course, is that to overcome Russian defensive positions and to cover the territory, modern military doctrine demands a combined arms capability comprising a balanced force of main battle tanks, infantry combat vehicles and self-propelled artillery, together with all the supporting arms, from reconnaissance to combat engineers, all provisioned by extensive and efficient logistics.

Nowhere in the order of battle in any first-rate army is there any provision for armoured cars – their functions having been long overtaken by specialist reconnaissance vehicles. It wouldn’t surprise me if Johnson had been reading WWII comic books.

As to providing more equipment, it is a common if understandable fallacy that more necessarily means better. Many years ago when I was looking at the problems of EU expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, and the provision of developmental aid, I came across the concept of “absorptive capacity”.

In a nutshell, this is a measure of the ability of a nation to absorb aid to good effect, and to plan and implement development schemes in an efficient and timely manner. In the context, it is pointless providing more than the capacity can support – any excess is lost in inertia, inefficiency and corruption.

While the term applies to civilian life, it also applies to the military. Doubling the number of tanks in an army doesn’t automatically – or at all – double the striking power.

Without the experienced command structures and personnel, trained and experienced soldiers to man the vehicles, and without the supporting arms and logistics, all you are doing is increasing the number of targets and the useless mouths to feed.

Integrating new equipment into an army, in any substantial quantities, takes time – typically years, even where a sound military infrastructure exists. And, in the Ukrainian army, we have a force that is not even able to train its own soldiers and is dependent on outside agencies to do the job.

Furthermore, the hodgepodge of different equipment being donated to the Ukrainian army must be creating a nightmare in terms of logistical, maintenance and training requirements – to say nothing of ongoing interoperative complications – all too familiar to Nato forces, which hampers the ability of disparate forces to work effectively together.

Thus, it is not unreasonable to assert that all Johnson is doing is offering empty rhetoric, promoting unattainable schemes and unrealistic solutions. And while this may be Johnson’s stock-in-trade, one does wonder what the WSJ is doing in giving him house room.

But it is even worse than that. Ukraine is having to confront the nightmare scenario of what amounts to total war, where the civilian population is part of the equation and an area of vulnerability which could trigger a collapse of the military effort.

Here, as this article points out, things are not looking good. The Russian assault on the energy infrastructure and its continuous shelling of battle area settlements are creating almost intolerable stresses which are beyond the immediate capability of the Kiev government to resolve.

Even to stay in the war – much less win it – Ukraine needs massive humanitarian aid, and engineering support to repair its fractured infrastructure, on top of substantial financial assistance to support its ailing economy.

The superficiality of Johnson’s nostrums does nothing more than to demonstrate how fortunate we were to be rid of him, but it also illustrates that we have a long way to go before the needs of Ukraine are properly understood and articulated. Giving Johnson a platform has done the country no favours.