Juice & Moonfish: Developing Better Military Institutions In Ukraine
The loss of another skilled young pilot puts a spotlight on the growing pains Ukrainian forces are dealing with. Shedding Soviet habits is, like any regime shift, a tough process.
The end of August brought a surge of activity in the Ukraine War. Mightily provoked by Ukraine’s Kursk Campaign, Putin’s is responding by pushing his orcs to even higher rates of self-destruction than they had already achieved.
As someone with an academic background in policy, it’s fascinating to watch the Institution of Putinism, which I more often refer to as ruscism (russian fascism), thrash about in Ukraine. The absence of any strategy beyond trying to exhaust Ukraine and its partners continues to be apparent.
Sadly, just over a week ago now, Ukraine’s first Viper went down in an accident during a combat mission. Worse, the pilot, known by the alias Moonfish, was killed.
Investigations are underway, and there’s no point in speculating on the actual cause, though hostile fire has been explicitly ruled out. A certain Ukrainian legislator has poisoned the investigation - and possibly future support from Ukraine’s allies - by alleging friendly fire. Makes a fella wonder who this particular politician is connected to in the USA. Moscow’s agents usually play this sort of thing a bit smarter.
Regardless, the loss of Moonfish just a year after Juice, another well known and promising young pilot, also died in an accident, implies some dangerous Institutional growing pains. Ukraine replacing the head of the air force does too, though in this case the movement appears positive. Evidence of similar troubles has accumulated across Ukraine’s ground forces of late, with some brigades lacking effective leadership, training, and kit to handle orc assaults.
Unfortunately, there aren’t any short-term fixes. It is extremely frustrating to have identified some of the issues responsible for challenges Ukraine is dealing with now a full two and a half years ago only to see the powers that be fail to adequately respond.
As ever, the root of the problem is Ukraine’s wishy-washy, excuse-prone bureaucrat allies, especially the Biden-Harris Administration but also that dismal energy vampire Olaf Scholz of Germany. America’s foreign policy Institutions have decayed to the point all those working in them can imagine is the status quo persisting forever. A monstrous, mindless bureaucracy enabled by self-serving tenured academics has gotten thousands of Ukrainians killed who could be alive and well today.
It has also kept the USA from pushing Israel into accepting a deal to free the hostages taken by Hamas almost a year ago. The result? Another six hostages, including an American citizen, sacrificed on the altar of geopolitics. Add them to at least 41,000 Palestinians, at least two thirds of them civilians, and the close to 2,000 Israeli dead.
All equal in death, victims of broken international Institutions. The time is long past for an alternative. May the construction of something new begin in Ukraine. For the time being, the present battles will continue.
Weekly Overview1
This past week, as anyone who read my report from Thursday will probably recall, most eyes turned to the Pokrovsk front, where the orcs burst through an important defensive line. Fortunately, as expected, wild claims about the whole Donbas front collapsing are already looking very premature.
At least two reasonably fresh brigades have appeared between the orcs and Pokrovsk, and over the past few days the enemy’s progress has substantially slowed. Most of the territory that ruscist forces have seized is southeast of Pokrovsk, where Moscow clearly hopes to encircle up to four Ukrainian brigades holding positions west of the Vovcha.
Once Ukrainian forces withdraw from the exposed salient east of the Vovcha the line here will shorten substantially, allowing for a substantial concentration of combat power to hold the Ukrainsk-Kurakhivka area. This should be defensible, with a nice big reservoir covering the right flank and high ground to the rear. Even if Selydove falls, the orcs there will be wedged between two patches of higher ground on either flank.
Ukraine has held on in Hrodivka, 151st Mechanized Brigade (hope the trucks serve you well!) bolstered by elements of 71st Jager, the Kara-Dag brigade of the Offensive Guard, or both. This town is also set at the base of a slope, making it difficult for the orcs to seize and maintain control. So far Moscow hasn’t pushed through Vozdvyzhenka towards the Kostiantynivka-Pokrovsk highway, though it sounds as if this isn’t for want of effort, so Ukraine must have enough combat power on the northern flank to keep the enemy off that important height.
Whether Ukraine is building up strong forces along this flank in advance of a counterattack is impossible to tell, though a recent evacuation order for civilians in the area may suggest a desire to move troops in. If nothing else, a steady stream of drone footage from the outskirts of occupied Avdiivka suggest that ruscist supply lines are getting hit harder and harder as they extend west.
Moscow’s actions here are well-founded in a purely operational sense, provided their goal is to make progress at any cost. Pokrovsk is at the outer edge of Ukraine’s logistics network, the most vulnerable part of the whole front. But losing it - not that this looks at all likely any time soon - wouldn’t break Ukraine’s defense in Donbas. So Moscow’s focus on it looks mainly opportunistic, and probably represents a strategic error.
Bloggers over in orcland are supposedly talking up the threat of a Ukrainian push towards Melitopol. Hey, the more places they’re worried about, the better.
Kursk is a whole different problem for Moscow. Losing a portion of mother russia is bad enough, but the longer Ukraine’s occupation goes on the harder it will be to fully dislodge it. This front is set to become a nagging concern, a thorn in Putin’s side that constantly reminds his people of how weak his regime actually is. He’s also got to consider the possibility of Ukraine doing the same thing in Bryansk and conscripts simply giving up without a fight.
In a strategic sense, Kursk fulfills not only this valuable purpose but also the essential task of making Putin commit every resource that can possibly be spared from fighting in occupied Ukraine. Responding to Kursk with a scratch force of conscripts and brigades in the process of reconstruction after being decimated, while also trying to distract from the whole debacle by clawing towards Pokrovsk means, that some other fronts will wind up stripped of reserves and vulnerable to a surprise attack.
At the operational level, Ukraine’s push into Kursk has not yet culminated but can be expected to within two to four weeks. By not attempting to rush all the way to L’gov and Rylsk, Ukraine wisely avoided the risk of becoming over-extended. This has probably kept the rate of combat power loss on the lower side, meaning that instead of a 1% decline in strength each day Ukraine may be looking at half that, meaning that the formations in the fight can keep up the pace for two months instead of one.
Ukraine doesn’t need to risk a swift advance when Moscow is content to keep feeding battalions into the front piecemeal. Though the soldiers arriving in the area have begun to mount larger and more organized counterattacks, Ukrainian troops occupying solid positions have been mostly tearing them apart.
It is now apparent that hundreds of Putin’s conscripts are cut off from support, surrounded by Ukrainian combat teams. Supposedly Ukraine has actively worked to encircle conscript groups then set ambushes on the roads for orc regulars coming to their rescue. There continues to be talk of up to two thousand prisoners, with Moscow reportedly keen to exchange them for Ukrainians held in captivity to mitigate the political backlash.
Tom Cooper has termed this a wild swine hunt (wildschweinjagd), referencing the need to reduce wild boar populations in Central Europe by sending hunters out to shoot them (they still radioactive from Chernobyl, I wonder?). In Oregon, the state will soon attempt something similar to try and preserve the endangered spotted owl, presently being crowded out of its remaining habitat by barred owls. The solution: play barred owl calls from loudspeakers set by roads to lure them into shotgun range.
It’s unpleasant and unfortunate to have to refer to human beings in these terms, but then again, the same is true of having to kill one kind of animal to preserve another because the environment at large has been so badly disrupted. If Ukraine could get at Putin and end the war without having to kill eight thousand russians every day, it would.
Instead, it’s got to keep wiping out hostile formations as it can get at them. The key is to do as much damage as possible with every bit of combat power at Ukraine’s disposal. That’s the only way to win when outnumbered.
The tradeoff of this kind of fighting is that the lines look static, with journalists inevitably describing the campaign as stalled or blunted even though formations are moving across the gray zone all the time. Ukraine is simply enjoying a golden opportunity to annihilate ruscist reserves while slowly choking off the area south of the Seym around Glushkovo to secure the western flank. Here Moscow dispatched a couple thousand soldiers to join nearly a thousand conscripts at risk of defeat, only to have Ukraine blow up the bridges connecting them to Rylsk.
Since, the orcs have constructed something like a dozen pontoon bridges in series only to have them all blasted to bits by HIMARS and JDAM strikes. Ukraine is managing to deliver glide bombs of its own to the front line, MiG-29 and Su-27 jets able to come as close as 25km behind the front lines, release weapons after a vertical climb, and still have a decent chance of coming home. This is happening despite an apparent ruscist effort to deploy more air defenses in the area.
While it is still possible that Ukraine will pull back, my sense is that the positions it seized at the outset were intended to form the outer perimeter of Free Kursk to the east and north. On these directions Ukraine will only move a bit farther into russia as opportunity permits, mostly to buffer the defenses around Sudzha. To the west, Glushkovo will slowly fall under Ukrainian control, with a push through Korenovo to Rylsk remaining a distinct possibility after.
Kursk and Pokrovsk remain dueling campaigns, though indirectly. The big question is what other reserves Ukraine is preparing to send into battle this September, and where they strike. I hope to focus on that in next Monday’s post.
What strategic reserves Moscow had have gone to Kursk, so once each separate front’s operational reserves are exhausted, effective forward movement should largely cease in most. Vast swaths of the line of contact remain mostly quiet, aside from mortar and grenade launcher shelling, because resources are always limited and need to be intelligently concentrated for maximum effect.
The greatest concentration of ruscist air strikes has already shifted to the hottest fronts, lowering the effectiveness of orc attacks on on the Siversk, Lyman, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia fronts. All report daily ground attacks, but small enough to repel. Chasiv Yar has likewise seen near constant orc efforts to get across a key canal, but without visible success.
Kupiansk has seen a higher rate of bigger orc assaults of late, focusing on the two sectors that have attracted most of Moscow’s attention all year, Pischane to the southeast and Synkivka north of the town proper. The latter has been subjected to a steady meter by meter grind, while the former fell a few weeks ago and since became a staging area for a clear effort to surround a Ukrainian force operating just to the south.
This sector is just thirty kilometers north of where Third Assault, one of Ukraine’s premier brigades, recently launched what it described as a spoiling attack against ruscist forces near Novovodiane towards Svatove, a key district center. I suspect that Moscow planned to send another pincer northwest in an effort to surround several Ukrainian brigades before pushing to the Oskil river. In theory, by upsetting Moscow’s choreography Third Assault becomes free to counterattack towards Pischane where before it would have been fending off an assault.
The Svatove area is a potential sleeper zone for a surprise Ukrainian counteroffensive. I formerly assessed that proximity to orc bases across the international border would make an offensive here difficult; now that Ukraine has demonstrated the capacity for taking chunks of russian turf, the line from Svatove in occupied Luhansk to Valuyki in Belgorod district might be vulnerable.
It is the potential for this more than the rail line linking Kupiansk and Lyman farther south that likely keeps Ukrainian brigades holding their bridgehead across the Oskil. If Moscow were to have any substantial success here, Ukraine could likely trade the bridgehead for a few tens of thousands of orc casualties and be no worse off in a strategic or operational sense - save perhaps a shot at breaking through Svatove.
Closer to Pokrovsk, holding Toretsk likely matters more, as the place would be used as a springboard to drive into Kostiantynivka. The orcs have still been pushing here too, with the pace slowing as Ukrainian reinforcements settled in.
The outlying suburbs to the south and east are conquered, and the orcs now hold the major slag heaps guarding the town’s eastern flank. They’re trying to storm the urban center, but without control over the access routes into town this is a very dangerous move. The fall of Toretsk does not look imminent or inevitable, but the fighting will be tough. If Moscow gives up on Chasiv Yar, a brigade or two should be able to shift south to assist.
All in all, Ukraine’s forces are still holding out reasonably well, even in Pokrovsk, especially considering how few brigades are deployed here. Time will tell if Syrskyi is in fact drawing his enemy on, letting them exhaust themselves and open to a counterattack.
Something most journalists and many policy wonks don’t seem to understand is that it doesn’t ultimately matter if Ukraine has to retreat twenty kilometers on every front if Moscow fully exhausts itself in the process. When Moscow finally runs out of reserves, so long as Ukraine has enough of its own Kyiv can take it all back and more.
Putin’s orc generals are behaving in a manner reminiscent of the way Germany’s did in late 1944, after the failed 20 July coup shredded the last of the German military establishment’s credibility in Hitler’s eyes. Ordered to halt the enemy at any cost, Germany’s generals threw ever more unready soldiers into the path of the steamroller. Their professional incentives revolved around carrying out their government’s orders, so they did. To the bitter end, for the most part. The wiser ones broke contact in the final days and escorted columns of refugees west, surrendering to the Western Allies.
That helps to explain the sudden resumption of costly and increasingly rare mass armor assaults down on the Vuhledar Front. 79th Air Assault and 72nd Mechanized have made something of an art out of annihilating ten or twenty orc armored vehicles in a day of fighting, aided by the flat open fields and deep experience with the area - one benefit of only rotating a part of a brigade away from a sector and not the whole thing.
Still, the orcs appear to be determined to finally get to Vuhledar, late this weekend throwing large numbers of troops into the fray. They’ve reportedly made some new progress not yet mapped, and if able to achieve a breakthrough Vuhledar could be encircled in a few weeks.
I doubt it, but the possibility is there. As with Pokrovsk, the fall of Vuhledar would not be crippling, and might even give Ukraine a chance to shorten its front line. But having held out in such a vulnerable location for so long, pulling back would hurt, especially if a reserve defense line has not been constructed.
It should have been, but Institutions are what they are, and Ukraine still has to deal with a degree of Soviet style deception between one branch or level of government and another. Hey, in the US we’re all supposed to pretend that a pittance of climate investment and the mere down payment on the country’s infrastructure maintenance backlog is some kind of historic victory. Corruption takes many forms.
To sum up the fighting on the ground as September begins, I’d invoke the metaphor of a hurricane. Though I’ve never endured one personally, my understanding is that the worst moment usually comes just after the eye passes overhead. The back end of the eyewall is a real doozy, but after that, conditions improve.
For a brief moment at the start of the Kursk Campaign the smoke shroud of semi-mystical nonsense Putin and his fellow travelers use to obscure the truth about russia’s future parted. The world caught a glimpse of what this war will look like as Moscow’s power wanes. Equipment shortages are real and getting worse; on some fronts vehicles are now hardly used, and on all motorcycles, quad bikes, and golf carts are appearing not just to aid logistics, but to speed assaults.
Despite a slow increase in the average number of soldiers lost in a given day, Moscow’s vehicle losses have lately been declining. On the Pokrovsk front, orc successes have mostly come from sending endless waves of infantry crawling over the bodies of those slain by cluster shells and drones. They’re also using chemical grenades, just to make this conflict look even more like the First World War, only with drones.
Putin’s rising fear and frustration is visible in the resumption of mass drone and missile strikes against civilian targets in Ukraine. Ukraine’s own drone campaign has continued to whack oil facilities and air bases, even a power plant or two, as deep into Putin’s empire as Moscow. An oil refinery in Kirov, hundreds of kilometers east of Moscow, took a hit. Another storage depot in Rostov, along the main highway linking it to Moscow, set off a spectacular explosion just as the fires from the other depot in Rostov that Ukraine smashed finally died down.
Over time, Ukraine’s drone attacks will pose a serious threat simply by forcing Moscow to use up vast quantities of air defense missiles. An attack drone is almost certainly cheaper than any missile. You’ll never achieve air superiority over a country the size of russia (or China), but there’s a flip side: you can’t defend all that airspace, either. So the drones will keep on coming, at least until old-school flak cannons make a return.
Moscow’s own missile and drone attacks are getting smarter, unfortunately. By mapping out Ukraine’s air defense network with Shahed drones, the orcs can select targets not adequately covered. Poltava suffered a tragedy just this weekend as ballistic missiles hit a military academy before students could take shelter. Dozens were killed.
The solution has been obvious for two and a half years: Give Ukraine every Patriot system it can operate as quickly as possible. Combat jets too - and not only F-16s.
Before perishing, Moonfish used his Viper to knock down cruise missiles and drones that might otherwise have killed dozens. As tragic as it is to lose anyone, what makes it more bitter is the fact that his death was likely preventable. Juice’s too. Training and operational accidents happen, but good Institutions minimize the toll.
Ukraine has been forced by its partners to fight for every bit of assistance it has ever received. This has distracted it from developing the essential Institutions it needs to put aid to effective use. That lack of Institutional capacity is then used to justify slowing further aid.
The consequences of this bureaucratic trap? Good people have died. They deserve justice. Positive change would be a good start. It’s past time to send people to set up a dedicated, multi-domain training center in Ukraine.
Institutional Change: An Eternal Challenge2
Institutions happen to be a topic what has won a number of scholars Nobel Prizes, notably Elinor Ostrom. In a scientific sense the term sums up to what most folks think of as rules of conduct. Codes about what behaviors are acceptable.
Formal laws and ordinances are part of Institutions, but what’s really key is the customary and habitual ways that people interpret their meaning. Killing someone being against secular and even most religious law is pretty much a human universal, but with a catch: the line between an excusable killing and one considered to be outright murder varies from place to place. Self-defense is also a universal idea, but what that means in practice is not the same in Oregon, Sweden, Laos, and Iran.
Some will claim that societies which consider themselves to be “Western” share values more readily with each other than they do those hailing from the “East” or “South,” but this is simply untrue. Institutions are created and sustained by people, founded on collective assumptions that drive common behavior without anyone actively coordinating anything directly. Without Institutions, life isn’t possible - humans naturally create them; universal aspects of life like language are deeply embedded Institutions we’re all born into. No one is a total blank slate.
The most powerful Institutions are those that control what people believe to be possible. A dramatic and irreversible failure of a key global Institution, the broad order that emerged after the Second World War, is the ultimate cause of the Ukraine War. While Putin’s malevolent designs on Ukraine are a product of the system he has built to sustain his power, it was the failure of the US-led international community to protect Ukraine that marks the point of no return.
Sometimes to avert war you have to threaten war. When Putin mobilized to invade Ukraine he made no secret of his intentions. Success meant a fight with NATO sooner or later. The Biden Administration failed to meet the moment.
Institutions exist at multiple levels, smaller order ones nested inside broader entities. They’re living organisms, and so best evaluated using a modified ecosystems approach.
Institutions are also everywhere, shaping our lives in countless small ways. Conventions of language are an Institution. The peaceful transfer of power after an election is too.
Strictly speaking, from a scientific perspective electoral democracy is a least-bad solution to an eternal problem in human society. We all have our own ideas about what our government should do with the taxes it collects from us. Government in some form is universal, and taxes are its way of reserving control over a portion of our labor.
The other side of the bargain is that the government is supposed to guarantee basic rights and services to everyone regardless of their identity or power. But identity is the cornerstone of society - there are always some bounds set on what expression is considered acceptable in certain spaces. No society is an undifferentiated mass, but a collection of groups who cooperate because this tends to be beneficial most of the time.
But you’ve got to have some means of dealing with the fact that some groups will amass more power than other ones, then use it to entrench certain privileges at others’ expense. Eventually, the system breaks. The best solution is to chain anyone in a position of power with strict rules about what they can and can’t do, then hold regular open elections to decide who gets to be entrusted with a term in office.
This works on a scientific level by giving everyone in a community hope that their core interests will be respected over the long run. Nobody will be a perpetual victim, everyone wins sometimes. Even if you don’t trust the electoral system personally, you at least don’t feel that it preys on you.
That’s the Institution of Democracy, in a nutshell - and if this condition ever breaks, the thing is done. The specific details of how one country structures the thing doesn’t matter as long as the perpetual balance between interests is maintained.
Effective Institutions have a way of persisting because a lot of people make their continued existence a cornerstone of decision making. Institutions do change: nothing remains static forever. But because Institutions are made up of people who have a stake in a certain mode of operation, their prospects in life bound to it, Institutions tend to exhibit substantial inertia.
The trouble with Institutions, like most aspects of social life, is people. Attempting to substantially change Institutions that have become maladaptive produces what social scientists call collective action problems - issues where trust prevents cooperation because people fear being taken advantage of.
Policy science might seem arcane, but it’s at the very heart of achieving what Ukraine must to secure its freedom. Ukraine’s Armed Forces are presently in the middle of a regime shift away from Soviet Institutions to something quite different. Some will call it a “Western” mentality, but Ukraine is really constructing something distinct.
Soviet and Western thinking are structurally very similar anyway, sharing common origins. Each is rooted in ideological presumptions masquerading as science. Westerners simply port over the old Christian obsession with virtue (defined by priests, of course), splitting society up into groups deemed closer to or farther from the divine and abused accordingly. Marxists break everyone up by economic class instead, pretending these to be eternal so long as evil/capitalism lasts.
Both preach a future paradise founded upon ideological conformity after enduring a period of necessary dictatorship under the tutelage of powerful parental figures. Both ultimately force members to ignore any evidence or claims that run contrary to ideology.
Ukraine is in the middle of decolonizing itself, cleansing national Institutions of their Soviet legacy. But it’s also struggling to prevent Western interests from taking over and extracting Ukraine’s national wealth. All while fighting a war for its very life!
It’s important to keep in mind that, as a country of approximately 33 million people, Ukraine has fewer people than the US state of California and an economy smaller than Oregon’s, at least in nominal (not correcting for purchasing power) terms. Ukraine’s Armed Forces are responsible for protecting the Institution of a free and democratic Ukraine, but like any organization, its branches have a limited capacity for change in a given amount of time. One of the hardest learned lessons in the world of international development has been that you can throw all the resources you like at a problem in a country, but it amounts to nothing in the long run if proper Institutions aren’t built that allow locals to cope with problems on their own.
And this can’t be done by leaving them to their own devices: while you can’t impose anything on anyone and local knowledge must always drive operations, there are elements of Institution-building that have to be overseen by seasoned professionals for years before a full handover. Historically - and this is true of military missions - the most effective way to construct Institutions is direct involvement inside the host country.
One of the more egregious failure of Ukraine’s allies as been the adamant refusal - at least until Macron of France broached the topic - to consider deploying allies troops in Ukraine. The reason why is as banal as it is infuriating: those who guard key Institutions in the West, especially the United States, have chosen without the slightest shred of scientific justification to pretend that every inch of Ukrainian soil is the same in terms of risk to operations and the danger of escalation.
The pattern out of the Biden-Harris Administration even before Putin’s all-out assault in 2022 has been the same: lofty rhetoric, plenty of promises, then countless and ever more suspicious delays. Yes, bureaucracy in the US is a nightmare. But take a look at how readily Israel gets aid - even the deployment of two aircraft carrier battle groups while there are none left in the Western Pacific to deter big scary China or the Atlantic to protect NATO.
Institutionally, American foreign policy is governed by the basic assumption that foreigners are ranked according to their worthiness. Israel is right at the top with the other Five Eyes countries (UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada). Western Europe is somewhere below, Eastern after, then comes East Asia. Everyone else is in speculative territory.
Presidential aspirant Harris, when questioned about her policy towards Gaza in a recent national interview, offered a perfect example of the dynamic at play when she spoke eloquently of Israeli suffering at the hands of Hamas a year ago before suggesting that Israel has killed too many Palestinians in reply. The signal is clear: Israeli lives matter more than Palestinian children to America.
Of course, even Israeli and American lives are sacrificed when a powerful leader wants to pretend to be tough. Hamas recently executed a group of hostages before they could be saved, a heinous act to be sure. But a ceasefire could have freed most or all months ago. After, Israel could have resumed the war with Hamas at its leisure. They didn’t even need to obliterate Gaza and expose a third of the population to diseased water to stop another Hamas assault - just actually guarding the border instead of storming settlements in the West Bank could have achieved that.
These are Western Institutions at work. Meanwhile, Ukraine is having to fight to get more than a handful of F-16 slots in the US pipeline next year. I’ve seen no evidence of Ukraine getting the additional thousand or so Bradley and M-113 armored vehicles it desperately needs. Zelensky is having to come to D.C. with a peace plan in hand like a child being assigned a homework assignment while US leaders are coming up with new justifications for Ukraine not doing things, like invade Kursk, that make Democrats uncomfortable ahead of another close election.
Ukraine has spent the entire war dealing with the consequences of decrepit American Institutions, sacrificing Ukrainian lives to avoid Biden and his gang of nincompoops having to face uncomfortable questions about his inept foreign policy. All the fear-mongering about escalation has ever been about is providing an excuse for eschewing the hard right in favor of the easy wrong, to paraphrase a drill sergeant I once knew.
The right way to train Ukrainians to master all forms of warfare was to dispatch a full NATO air wing and combat brigade to a remote place like Zakarpattia district, on the border with Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland. Under a full air defense umbrella provided by NATO jets and SAM systems, a massive training center should have been established through a collaboration between a non-profit NGO, Ukraine, and participating allies. This facility would have had the entire Ukrainian Carpathian region - a mountainous area that Moscow probably couldn’t have taken even if it conquered the rest of Ukraine - to train in well aware from the range of almost all ruscist surveillance drones.
Over 800km from the nearest russian turf, Zakarpattia is so close to NATO territory that any projectile heading towards it should be presumed to be a threat to the alliance anyway. And though it likely lacks infrastructure, that’s what engineers are for - NATO could use a new base on its eastern flank anyway, and Ukraine will eventually join NATO, right?
Obviously, Ukraine has training facilities scattered around the country, and I’m not talking about replacing those. It has also sent tens of thousands of soldiers abroad for training. But that won’t swiftly build higher level Institutional competence.
So far, Ukraine’s allies have treated open deployments anywhere in Ukraine as if this would mean direct involvement in hostilities. Despite it being clear within a few weeks of the all-out phase that crewed ruscist jets were not flying beyond Ukrainian lines, NATO has been terrified of protecting even a sliver of Ukrainian airspace along the Polish or Romanian borders.
Not only does demonstrating this level of fear give Putin leverage, it’s unjustified. Uncrewed vehicles are their own category of target, any interruption of signal transforming them into an unguided projectile. Worse, the biggest reason NATO is so hesitant is a preference for maintaining the illusion of unity across the organization rather than expose the fact that certain members aren’t reliable.
Doing basic and unit level training on a decentralized basis is fine. But Ukraine has gone from an army of some 200,000 in 2022 - and that from one scarcely able to function in 2014 - to around a million today. At the same time it’s lost probably a third to a half of the original personnel to death or crippling injury. Under the circumstances, it’s crazy to expect Ukraine to independently stand up brigade level training centers like the ones US soldiers pass through before deploying abroad.
But experience proves this to be necessary to build robust military Institutions. Even battalion level leaders have to constantly communicate with colleagues, and the more training they have in common the better. But this can’t be done in the Soviet - and increasingly Western - mode of memorizing facts and procedures. Modern warfare requires extreme flexibility and adaptability that can only come from a unique training curriculum put together by Ukrainian veterans with higher levels of support coming from abroad.
A big part of the reason why it is increasingly apparent that certain Ukrainian brigades lack staying power is almost certainly a lack of comprehensive training, especially among senior sergeants and mid level officers. While hands-on battlefield experience is invaluable, history has shown that a level of exposure to scientific theory helps build more effective leaders.
The impacts tend to both trickle down and spread across a force. Institution building begins with leaders who are trained to enlist their subordinates as colleagues to reveal all the pertinent information without bias. Combat will expose it anyway, so best to reveal deficiencies early on.
A common curriculum and shared experiences at the same geographic location are essential, but only possible in a location that can be protected from attack. Any concern about Ukrainian refugees could be partly mitigated through the existence of an identified safe zone protected by the international community. The potential has always been there, unrealized. And it isn’t (mostly, at least) Kyiv’s fault.
The loss of Moonfish, Juice, and too many others who deserved to live and build the professional Ukrainian Armed Forces of tomorrow is a tragic waste. Both domains are distinct from the land in that if platforms people have to go to war in fail, their crews die.
A multirole combat jet is by definition an unstable flying machine. That’s how they can perform such amazing maneuvers - it’s also why they crash more often than airliners. To be frank, I’d have selected the F-18 over the F-16 if I were Ukraine and had a choice in part because the former is supposedly less keen to roll. Twin engines and double vertical stabilizers are common on more rugged Soviet designs, and I suspect these add an element of safety at lower altitudes, hence the U.S. Navy preferring this arrangement. F-18s might fly a bit more like Soviet jets, and that difference could matter.
Regardless, although Ukraine’s pilots are undoubtedly qualified, gaining professional competence in a Soviet aviation context before switching to the Western creates a unique hazard. Certain instincts, once baked in, can be extremely difficult to unlearn - especially in combat. And the slightest hesitation or confusion can likewise be fatal when an aircraft is operating at the edge of its performance. Most people are aware that Soviet and russian aviators are granted very little freedom - well, this factors into variables like how a cockpit is laid out, too. That’s one of the powers and perils of Institutions.
To be clear, I’m not speculating on why Moonfish might have gone down. Aviation is a dangerous business, and something as random as an unlucky bird strike during landing can be fatal when flying something as nimble as an F-16. Ukraine is apparently using highways as remote air strips, which is an excellent idea, but also means that pilots flying at night can make a tiny error and hit a power line or some trees.
The inherent risk is why the US military aviation community has developed a range of Institutions to mitigate the hazard to the degree possible. They’re baked in deep, lived by personnel every day. It’s amazing, when you think about it, that pilots landing on aircraft carriers don’t screw up a lot more often. Institutions powered by science are key.
A critical component in Institution building in an aviation context resides at the squadron level, with senior pilots there to mentor newer ones. The way Ukraine’s Viper pilots are being trained makes this difficult. It would be ideal for Ukraine to have a training squadron composed of contractor pilots who live and work in the country and even fly limited air defense missions.
That was the real potential of establishing a “Flying Tigers” squadron at the earliest possible opportunity, as I and others advocated. As soon as Ukrainian pilots finished basic F-16 training abroad, they could have begun advanced training in Ukrainian skies in direct partnership with veteran Viper pilots. That would have simulated the mentorship cycle NATO pilots enjoy, helping identify and rectify Soviet thought patterns during intensive training and defense missions in their home country. It would also have made the first wider Ukrainian deployment of combat jets more of a surprise. Ukraine would have also been in a better position to establish its own F-16 training pipeline.
Similarly, I argued two and a half years ago that Ukraine should be given several old Ticonderoga-class missile cruisers the U.S. Navy is retiring. Ukraine could now have several ships that were either static air defense batteries moored at port or conducting coastal patrols. Able to shoot down Kh-22 missiles originally intended to hit US aircraft carriers, their Aegis systems and Standard missiles would have freed up ground-based defenses near Odesa. They would likely have required AWACS support, but NATO jets fly over the Black Sea all the time.
These are not unique ideas - many have voiced similar ones. They represent approaches to conflicts in the past that worked as intended. Soviet pilots fought Americans over North Korea, and Soviet technicians helped North Vietnamese SAM operators shoot down US jets over Hanoi. World War Three did not ensue.
In the Muscovite mindset, this is simply what you do if you can. Failure to seize such low hanging fruit is taken as evidence of vulnerability.
But Western experts have a mindset of their own. In it, everything is negotiable, because we’re all just out for profit anyway, right? Putin uses that to encourage Biden, Scholz, and their ilk to take the easy way out and proclaim support for Ukraine for as long as it takes. Which is also a signal suggesting they’d rather Ukraine accept a bad deal so the world can move on. Fear of escalation is only an excuse.
Then this can all happen again - just not on their watch. They have their legacies to look out for.
Conclusion - The Strategic Angle3
Institutions are at the heart of the Ukraine War, from why it happened at all to the reason it’s still raging today. If the so-called free world committed to its own lofty rhetoric, Putin would have been beaten well over a year ago.
That it refuses to even today means that the so-called Western, liberal, rules-based international order is a con. A lie intended to deceive billions of people into accepting a pure fantasy: that the leaders of the West care about anything but their own fortunes and legacies written by well paid biographers.
They are not now nor ever will take meaningful action to stop the destruction of the biosphere, end poverty, prevent new pandemics, or even defend democracy in places like Ukraine and Taiwan. Having built anti-democratic systems to insulate themselves from true accountability, most world leaders in whatever region have more in common with each other than they do their own people. They inherited a system constructed by the people who lived through the Second World War and have actively squandered all their predecessors built.
For those of us not living in a fantasy world where democratic governments are going to suddenly stand up, admit they’re corrupt, and reform, the future depends on building alternative Institutions. We’ve got to actually realize the vision, only dimly perceived in the middle of the 1940s, of an international order that actually lives up to the name.
The world is in dire need of a truly independent but accountable defense Institution. The Earth Defense Force, as call it in my science fiction, is a prerequisite to progress on all global matters. Instead of the toothless blue helmets of the UN, this has to be a new kind of international organization, one committed to truly universal enforcement of basic human rights.
Even the powerful may come to wish the world had one already. Because most security Institutions around the globe are not ready for the impact of the humble drone.
What happens when no one can protect anything from anyone? When leaders are afraid to go out in public because they can’t be safeguarded against drones dropping a torrent of burning metal?
Big wars have a way of forcing Institutions to embrace change. The ones that have become too rigid crumble.
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