The Ukraine Hawks' Problem

The policies Donald Trump has articulated over Ukraine have been consistent, and he restated them over the weekend:

Former President Donald Trump said he could solve the Russia-Ukraine war "in 24 hours," while speaking at his presidential campaign kickoff in New Hampshire on Saturday.

. . . "My personality kept us out of war," the former president continued. "And I told you before, [it] would have never happened with Russia. Putin would have never ever gone in. And even now I could solve that in 24 hours. It's so horrible what happened. Those cities are demolished now."

Trump concluded by saying that if he was president, there would have been "zero chance that war would have happened."

The problem for Ukraine is that following the September 2022 Russian rout in Donbas and the November Russian withdrawal from northern Kherson, their counteroffensive has stalled, and they've resumed calls for more effective Western weapons, at this point main battle tanks and F-16 jets. The Western response has been continued reluctant incrementalism, with President Biden repeating the response he's made over the past year, denying such requests but then relenting over a period of weeks:

#BREAKING Biden says "no" to US sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine pic.twitter.com/32Y8S1HUSU

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) January 30, 2023

Given his record, he'll change his mind in March or so, which means it will take just that much longer to bring the F-16s on line.

The difficulty at this point is that the history of the war for much of 2022 was Russian advance, followed by a period of stalemate, followed by a dramatic Russian rout. Nevertheless, as the map above shows, Russia retains considerable area that it had seized after the February invasion, and it continues to hold all its post-2014 territory. Optimistic predictions by the retired general talking heads that much of this could be regained in 2023 are being rolled back. Instead, the Institute for the Study of War now projects:

Western, Ukrainian, and Russian sources continue to indicate that Russia is preparing for an imminent offensive, supporting ISW’s assessment that an offensive in the coming months is the most likely course of action (MLCOA). NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg stated on January 30 that there are no indications that Russia is preparing to negotiate for peace and that all indicators point to the opposite. Stoltenberg noted that Russia may mobilize upwards of 200,000 personnel and is continuing to acquire weapons and ammunition through increased domestic production and partnerships with authoritarian states such as Iran and North Korea. Stoltenberg emphasized that Russian President Vladimir Putin retains his maximalist goals in Ukraine. Head of the Council of Reservists of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, Ivan Tymochko, relatedly stated that Russian forces are strengthening their grouping in Donbas as part of an anticipated offensive and noted that Russian forces will need to launch an offensive due to increasing domestic pressure for victory.

The Ukraine Hawks in the military and foreign policy establishment are beginning to recognize the problem. Michael McFaul is, according to Wikipedia,

an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. McFaul is currently the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. . . . He is also a Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. . . . McFaul worked for the U.S. National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs. In that capacity, he was the architect of U.S. President Barack Obama's Russian reset policy.

So this is an important guy. He wrote yesterday in Foreign Affairs,

There are risks to providing more and better weapons to Ukraine, but there are also risks to not doing so. If the war in Ukraine drags on for years, so many more people—Ukrainians first and foremost, but also Russians—will die. “Stalemate” on the battlefield is a euphemism for continued death and destruction. This is the cost of incrementalism.

Protracted war also risks losing public support in the United States and Europe. At the end of 2022, Biden signed into law a new $45 billion aid package for Ukraine. This should fund U.S. military assistance until the end of this year, including new weapons systems such as ATACMs and fighter jets, should they be given the green light. But now that the House of Representatives is under Republican control, future appropriations could be less forthcoming.

. . . Western leaders need to shift how they approach the conflict. At this stage, incrementally expanding military and economic assistance is likely to only prolong the war indefinitely.

. . . The way this new military assistance is announced also matters. Rather than providing ATACMs in March, Reapers in June, and jets in September, NATO should go for a Big Bang. Plans to provide all these systems should be announced on February 24, 2023, the first anniversary of Putin’s invasion.

It's worth noting that this has been the strategy Zelensky and the Ukrainian armed forces have advocated all along, and indeed still advocate. As of this morning, though, it appears that President Biden is sticking with the strategy of reluctant incrementalism he's displayed over the past year.

But beyond that, even the strategy McFaul advocates, a Big Bang announcement at the end of next month, has the same problems that have hobbled the existing incrementalist strategy -- the US finally approves Weapon Whatever, but this requires shipping Weapon Whatever first to Poland, and then extensive training of Ukrainian soldiers in the new weapon, new logistical channels to support the new weapon, and so forth, such that the effects of the new weapon don't emerge for months. Meanwhile, there's stalemate, and the war drags on.

Add to that the additional issue that the last Weapon Whatever, HIMARS, allowed some limited gains, but the Russians adapted to it, and the result has been renewed stalemate until the next Weapon Whatever arrives -- in this case, Bradleys. But we won't learn how that will turn out for months.

It's happening now, and it will happen even if NATO announces a Big Bang on February 24. The problem is that whatever we do on February 24, 2023, we're stuck with the results of our strategy throughnout 2022. As a retired US lieutenant colonel pointed out the other day regarding new weapons,

“You can’t send 500 [Ukrainian] dudes to Germany and conduct six weeks of maneuver training and think you’re going to get the same output, because those guys don’t have the experience,” he said. “They don’t even have the baseline understanding that we had a whole career and our whole training before we even arrived at that one year preparation.”

Davis suggests imagining the chances that someone who has “never even seen this equipment” will “have to just fall in on it while they’re in [combat] potentially a few months from now — which is what they’re saying they’re trying to do — and it’s somehow those things are going to be effective in combat.”

“I mean just on the surface of it, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “I mean it’s people who just don’t have any idea of how actual combat power is generated that would believe that.”

Lt Col Davis is referring to Abrams tanks, which are months away from shipping in the current pipeline, but his remarks could apply just as easily to the Bradleys said to be shipping now. One thing that's becoming more clear is that the West went into Ukraine without a serious plan and without a clear set of objectives, which it's never taken the trouble to develop as the war has progressed. As a result, the US runs the risk of having the same result it's had in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, another long, expensive, and indecisive war.

At the same time, I think I may have made the mistake many others made late last year, assuming Trump was fading from the scene, when it turns out that that which does not kill him makes him stronger. His basic position is that Biden's weakness in Afghanistan created the conditions for Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and the current administration's policy of reluctant incrementalism has simply exacerbated the situation. The foreign policy establishment's belated turn away from incrementalism will likely be too late to fix the problem.

I misunderestimated Trump, I now think.