Ukraine: fantasy warfare
By Richard North - March 28, 2024
Published yesterday with some fanfare on Twitter is a longish exposition on Ukraine from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), with the full document (16 pages) available for download.
Authored by Nataliya Bugayova and the stalwart Fred Kagan with, Kateryna Stepanenko, this is headed: “Denying Russia’s Only Strategy for Success” and sets out a thesis which argues that “Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West – and will likely lose”.
Contrasting with my piece on 19 March headed “why the war is lost”, it seems there could hardly be a more damning rebuttal, and from such an authoritative source which is quoted widely by the legacy media.
However, we do not have to wait long for the ISW thesis to unfold as, in the very first paragraph we are informed of the necessary conditions for Russia to lose the war. This will occur, we are told, “if the West mobilises its resources to resist the Kremlin”.
Of course, that word “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but the authors rely on the economic disparity between Russia and the West, making the economic case for victory, the opposite of the economic case I make in my own piece.
Rightly, the authors point out that the West’s existing and latent capability dwarfs that of Russia. They note that the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of Nato countries, non-Nato EU member states and our Asian allies is over $63 trillion.
By comparison, the Russian GDP is on the close order of $1.9 trillion. Russia’s allies, specifically Iran and North Korea, add little in terms of materiel support. China is enabling Russia, but it is not mobilised on behalf of Russia and is unlikely to do so.
Thus, the authors conclude, “If we lean in and surge, Russia loses”. And there we have that “if” again, only this time we not only have to mobilise our resources, we also have to engineer a “surge”, which doesn’t seem to be exactly the same thing.
With that thought lodged as the immutable base though, we are advised that the notion that the war is “unwinnable” arises only because of Russia’s dominant “information operation” – by which, I take it, is meant the propaganda operation.
From this, it seems, we can glean the Kremlin’s “real strategy” and its “only real hope of success”. The Kremlin needs to consign the United States to the sidelines, permitting Russia to fight Ukraine in isolation. It can then proceed to Moscow’s next targets, which Russia will also seek to isolate.
Therefore, the Kremlin needs the United States to choose inaction and embrace the false inevitability that Russia will prevail in Ukraine. Putin’s centre of gravity is his ability to shape the will and decisions of the West, Ukraine, and Russia itself.
Thus, what matters on the ground is not so much Moscow’s warfighting strategy as the Kremlin’s strategy to cause us to see the world as it wishes us to see it, whence we make decisions in that Kremlin-generated alternative reality that will allow Russia to win in the real world.
Those who take the view that this means a Russian win, readers will be comforted to learn, are not ipso facto Russian dupes. The Kremlin links genuine sentiment and even some legitimate arguments to Russia’s interests in public debate – from which we can assume there is an element of logic in the supposition.
However, the cunning Kremlin is also an equal opportunity manipulator. It targets the full spectrum of those making or informing decisions and it partially succeeds on every side of the political spectrum.
Perception manipulation is one of the Kremlin’s core capabilities, which is now being unleashed with full force onto the Western public as the Kremlin’s only strategy for winning in Ukraine.
Not said, but we must assume that against this assault, the weak-minded supporters of Ukraine can only buckle. That, we are told, is not a challenge most societies are equipped to contend with.
Yet, for all that, the United States has the power to deny Russia its only strategy for success, even though it has allowed Russia to play an outsized role in shaping American decision-making. But this must change. The United States must surge its support to Ukraine, and it must do so in time.
Delays, we are warned, come at the cost of Ukrainian lives, increased risk of failure in Ukraine, and the erosion of the US advantage over Russia, granting the Kremlin time to rebuild and develop capabilities that it intends to use against the West – likely on a shorter timeline than the West assesses.
There is much more argument to this thesis, but it seems to boil down to the central assertion that the ultimate reasons for Ukraine’s failures on the ground relate to Russia’s ability to alter Western perceptions.
These manipulations, it is held, cost Ukraine gains in its 2023 counter-offensive, as the Russian “nuclear-centric information operations” in the autumn of 2022 delayed Western provision of tanks and other key capabilities to Ukraine.
It was the US failure proactively to resource Ukraine’s initiative, after two successful, successive counter-offensive operations in the autumn of 2022, which contributed to a missed opportunity for Ukraine to conduct a third phase of counter-offensive operations in the winter of 2022-2023.
This reprieve allowed Russia to build its defences in depth and conduct a partial mobilization to shore up manpower, making Ukraine’s 2023 counter-offensive an extraordinarily difficult undertaking.
No doubt the authors are genuine in making this argument, but that’s not the whole story, or by any means the story. I do recall that there was concern about supplying Ukraine with Western heavy metal, for fear of provoking escalation, but there were also the huge practical implications of absorbing new, unfamiliar and complex weapons systems into the order of battle.
Quite simply, even if the US had delivered the materiel that ISW thinks should have been provided (without stating what should have been delivered), it would doubtless have overwhelmed the absorptive capacity of the Ukrainian armed forces. It takes time to integrate new weaponry in any army, to train and to develop and practice the tactics which will allow best use to be made of the resource.
That applied then, and it applies now, only probably more so. With depleted manpower resources and a massive haemorrhage of trained and experienced troops, the Ukrainian capacity to expand and utilise a “surge” of materiel from the United States or elsewhere is extremely limited.
But there is far more to this than the ISW would have us believe. As I stated in my piece, this is a war of industrial capacity and the Western nations have allowed their warmaking capacity to decline so alarmingly that there is simply not the ability to supply Ukraine with what it needs at the scale necessary to sustain high-intensity operations.
We are all familiar with the endless Ukrainian pleas for more ammunition, and this has provided a graphic example of the difficulties in ramping up production from a standing start. Only now, two years into the conflict, are nations beginning to organise and even then it will be some time before adequate quantities reach the battlefield.
When it comes to detail, though, the hurdles attendant on provisioning a modern army for a sustained, peer-enemy conflict, are formidable. This is indicated not by the ISW but by a separate document which, by coincidence, was made known to me by a reader.
Produced by the Republic of Estonia Ministry of Defence, it is entitled “Setting Transatlantic Defence up for Success”, with a sub-title of “A military strategy for Ukraine’s victory and Russia’s defeat”, what it actually does – inadvertently – is set out the many reasons why Ukraine must fail.
For instance, as well as addressing the ammunition issue, it tells us that an additional limiting factor so far in the sustainability of Ukrainian fires is artillery barrels. It is assessed, it says, that Ukraine will need 1500-2000 barrels per year with each unit costing up to €900,000.
Then comes the killer. Given the limited number of barrel machines, particular focus should be provided for companies to expand barrel manufacturing. In reality, that capability would take years to expand and cost many billions, which companies would be unwilling to invest without the guarantee of sustained orders for the life of the plants.
Without putting industry on a war footing, that simply isn’t going to happen, and that is but one of many issues which would require the long-term commitment of not tens but hundreds of billions of dollars.
With the best will in the world, it is not politically sustainable for the United States to carry the whole load, so Europe would also have to step up to the plate. But, as this article indicates, that is unlikely to happen either.
In short, while the theoretical capability to defeat Russia, over the longer term, might exist, there is no political will to make it happen. To pretend otherwise is playing fantasy warfare.