Reclaiming The Initiative In Ukraine
The belated approval to use NATO weaponry inside russia has demolished Putin's last hope of winning in Ukraine. It remains an open question whether Biden and other leaders will let him lose.
It’s been an interesting week in the Ukraine War. Most of Ukraine’s partners have finally realized that it’s both cruel and inane to force Ukraine to fight in fetters when Moscow will never hesitate to use whatever tools or tactics it thinks will bring even marginal gains.
Even the Biden Administration has finally been forced to relax restrictions on Ukrainian attacks over the border with US supplied weapons - at least in Belgorod, using mid-range weapons like HIMARS and Patriot SAMs. Now that Moscow can no longer use its sovereign territory as a safe haven, the potential for a major offensive that surrounds Kharkiv and outflanks Ukraine’s defenses in Donbas has passed, probably for good.
Putin now lacks a viable operational solution to this conflict, even if his forces are still able to make limited tactical level gains by throwing bodies at the problem. But the window for even that is slamming shut. Ukraine’s defense stiffens in direct proportion to the amount of artillery ammunition it receives.The worst of the shell famine is now over, making recent orc adaptations to the persistent drone threat - like covering armored vehicles in so many steel plates they become turtle tanks or tracked garden sheds in the parlance of open source monitors - and functionally obsolete. The bigger equipment gets, the easier it is to score a hit that disables some vital part.
Meanwhile Ukraine’s expanded mobilization efforts have only just begun. The impact won’t be felt until September, and the magnitude of the effect largely depends on how well equipped Ukraine’s recuperating brigades are over the next three months. But given proper gear in sufficient quantities, Ukrainian forces may be able to repeat the successes of autumn 2022 exactly two years later.
Ukrainian aviation is slowly gaining strength, too with the first F-16s coming in weeks. Gripen jets may be in the pipeline, potentially coming as soon as early 2025. France has announced that it will soon provide Mirage 2000 jets, which are capable of replacing Ukraine’s dwindling population of Su-24s in the long-range strike role. Rumors about this possibility started up last year, and it appears that behind the scenes France has been taking some meaningful action.
Nice job, Macron. So your fine words aren’t just bluster after all. The timing is appropriate, given that the 80th anniversary of the landings in Normandy was celebrated yesterday. Funny how it’s the French who are finally calling Putin’s bluffs while the USA is home to the leading cheese-eating surrender monkeys of our day, to riff off the Simpson’s famous and entirely incorrect characterization. It was the leaders of Vichy who signed an accord with the Nazis that partitioned their country, not the average French citizen. De Gaulle and Free France fought back, drafting soldiers from France’s African colonies to reclaim la Métropole in one of history’s many ironies. France has its own nasty tendency to get wrapped up in long imperial wars - just ask Algeria. Or Vietnam before the US rotated in.
Nowadays the Biden Administration is playing the role France did the 1930s, much to America’s lasting shame. Just as Poland was betrayed and left to fight both the Nazis and Soviets all alone, Ukraine was very nearly sold to Putin in 2022 by a generation of leaders who use his threats of nuclear war to argue that the USA should force Ukraine to accept the brutal defeat that losing sovereign territory to a malevolent empire would entail. Fortunately it’s even harder to conquer a country now than it was eight decades ago thanks to the democratization of warfare, something officials in D.C. and Moscow alike somehow keep failing to understand.
It was pretty rich for Biden to show up at the D-Day commemoration and connect Ukraine’s fight for freedom to the struggle against the Nazis when he fails time and again to lead as he should. I don’t know who in his administration thought that it was a good visual to have him shuffle along clutching his wife to stay upright while Macron and his own spouse stroll alongside like a young couple accompanying grandpa and grandma on their daily walk. I don’t watch televised news, but sometimes catch clips on sites like AP that run them, and every time I see or hear Biden I cringe.
That optic along with some truly inane comments in a recent TIME piece aptly demonstrate why the best thing Biden could possibly do for Ukraine (and his own country) is retire now. This emperor has no clothing, and it’s notable that France is displacing America as Europe’s most vocal defender. While no politician can be trusted entirely, Macron at least seems to have a sense of what power is and how it is used. Say what you like about Kamala Harris, but I doubt she would be any worse than Biden. She might have enough humility to prove substantially better. I am biased where Harris is concerned, though, since she and my wife attended the same law school (at different times) and her parents were Berkeley educated.
In any case, after covering developments on the fronts this past week I’ll write a bit about what combat power is in a systems sense and how it’s generated. The final section offers more critical commentary about the Biden Administration, because it’s unfortunately necessary despite the otherwise positive step represented by finally letting Ukraine defend itself… mostly.
Weekly Overview
On the ground this week, Moscow has kept up the same steady grind on multiple fronts with little to show for the bloodshed. The orcs are still visibly losing upwards of 9,000 personnel a week, with even Putin admitting that his forces have taken 20,000 casualties each month. Those are probably only the numbers he hears about, with orc officers hiding casualties wherever possible, especially among the disposables who lead most assaults.
Ukraine’s ground personnel casualty estimates have held up very well throughout this war because most claims are verified on video. Aircraft claims are an exception, with Ukraine over-claiming by a factor of three, which is the historic norm for assessing aviation losses. Right now, assuming that the 30,000-per month training capacity in Putin’s empire is unchanged, orc operations require more bodies than Moscow can provide, leading to a long term degradation of combat power along the front.
It takes time for a personnel system to crash, but eventually it will happen. Even husbanding experienced troops isn’t enough when to compensate for high losses even formerly-elite airborne VDV units are thrown in to unwise assaults. The collapse manifests first as an inability to make progress even where efforts are concentrated. then individual units falling apart under stress. If you aren’t very careful, the effects soon cascade.
I don’t see an entire front collapsing like the one in Kharkiv did during 2022, but even the defeat of a single brigade, regiment, or several in a division can tear a hole in the lines at a critical point. One of Ukraine’s chief tasks is setting itself up to generate and exploit this kind of situation at several points on one or more fronts this autumn.
Ukraine can’t wait for 2025 or 2026 because there are no guarantees that Moscow won’t come up with some innovation or receive expanded Chinese support. Speed is life in war because the opportunities that matter are usually fleeting - the orcs know full well that their position is weak, which is why Putin keeps on attacking despite the poor exchange ratio and long term degradation of his own power.
As far as the fronts go, overall Moscow appears to understand that the best it can hope for on any battlefield is to stretch Ukrainian forces so thin that they can’t respond to every ruscist breakthrough. Short punches of up to 5km in a few days are all Moscow can manage, followed by a lengthy period of securing the new ground and expanding control of the flanks. Add two or three of these lunges together over the course of a month and the orcs can force Ukraine out of a town or two - but that’s about it.
The only option remaining to Moscow is to punch everywhere and hope that Ukraine is too worn out by fall to launch major counterattacks. In essence, it’s an attempt to mimic quicksand, capitalizing on panic and disorganization among any Ukrainian unit that is poorly led or lacks resources to slowly pull Ukraine’s reserves into the meat grinder. The goal is to inflict as much pain as possible in a brute force effort to generate systems collapse.
Area defense is the natural response to this sort of thing a patient defense that trades territory for blood - the enemy sheds theirs while friendly forces maintain their strength. But this approach can only bring Ukraine closer to victory if coupled to offensive action on fronts that are logistically isolated. Moscow’s military machine requires a tremendous amount of energy to sustain the throughput of supplies that its inefficient war machine demands, limiting the density of forces it can sustain on any front.
That’s what makes Ukraine having received substantial numbers of ATACMS systems and the imminent arrival of F-16s and more long-range air defense systems so important: they’ll further reduce the effective combat power that Moscow can bring to bear in any one place. Ukraine will soon have opportunities to throw punches where Moscow is weakest; these will steadily intensify, just like Ukraine’s attacks on Crimea.
Drilling down to the fronts themselves, there is little to report. The Kharkiv offensive is totally stalled, though Ukraine is concerned about Moscow launching a second round of attacks. Moscow appears to want to get across the Vovcha river west of Vovchansk, but so far Ukrainian troops from 82nd Air Assault, 36th Marine, 71st Jager, 57th Motorized, and several National and Territorial Guard brigades fighting in the area are holding firm.
A bit to the west, on the road to Lyptsi, 42nd Mech, 93rd Assault, and associated Guard units have apparently forced Moscow fully onto the defensive. Overall, with Ukrainian HIMARS barrages smashing targets across the border, it remains possible to envision a local counteroffensive pushing the orcs back across the border. Notably, one or more Free Russian battalions is active in Vovchansk, and these could potentially be used to establish a permanent foothold in Belgorod. Ukrainian units can’t cross the international border, but whatever Russians choose to do to reclaim their country, as impossible as that might seem right now, the world should support.
Moscow should be treated to a taste of its own medicine: if a border village or island can be convinced to vote to join Finland, Kazakhstan, or Japan, they ought to have backing from the rest of the world. This is decolonization and counter-imperialism in action. If borders mean nothing then power games reign just like in feudal times. Resources are wasted, people die, and almost everyone is worse off. That’s why the Postwar Order was constructed in the first place, and may all gods that be damn the cravens who let it fall apart!
Further south the orc offensive against Chasiv Yar has made some gains, slowly creeping towards the canal that forms Ukraine’s main defense line in the area. The outlying bastion of the Kanal district is finally enveloped on three sides, and with the surviving concrete structures being hit by glide bombs every day Ukraine pulling back soon seems inevitable. Then the orcs will get to inhabit ruins under constant fire from the rest of the city to the west. One ruscist attack either got lost or was highly ambitious, a troop carrier crossing the canal north of Chasiv Yar to disgorge an infantry team. It didn’t end well for them. Ukraine has been forced out of the ruined town of Klischchiivka to the south, but still holds the heights just to the west.
On the Avdiivka front orc efforts to push west to the Vovcha (that Vovcha, not the other one) continue. As expected Ukraine appears to be slowly withdrawing as Moscow pushes onto the high ground, doing damage while taking advantage of the high west bank of the Vovcha to set up an even stronger defensive line. Muscovite forces keep trying to push out from Ocheretyne, too, but with little luck. A bit further south the orcs are also still trying to take Krasnohorivka, where the 47th Mechanized Brigade recently appeared to conduct a counterattack on the flank of the orc advance, helping to slow their advance into the town itself.
The Siversk bulge is also fending off intense attacks, while farther south the Vuhledar front is reported to be set to get much tougher soon. Ukraine seems likely to be forced back some in the former sector, but if it rotates in a fresh brigade or two Moscow’s progress might be stopped cold.
With the fronts deadlocked despite Moscow’s ongoing 5:1 advantage in artillery shots, the strategic bombardment campaigns each side is waging continue to inflict damage. Putin’s forces have finally adopted something resembling a rational strategy, using large numbers of Shahed drones over a week to map out and probe Ukraine’s air defenses before launching one complex strike with multiple kinds of missiles coming from different directions to get at one or two important sites, mainly power plants in places not protected by Patriot or Aster systems, which is quite a few because Ukraine still only has four or five, going on maybe eight in the next few weeks. It needs thirteen minimum, ideally about twenty-five. The systems exist, but everyone in Europe clings to theirs, acting as if the few ruscist missiles that Moscow could spare for them in any war would be like orc paratroopers landing in the capitol city.
As the defenders of Kyiv proved, this isn’t a fatal blow. Look at what the people of Kharkiv have endured for twenty-seven months and counting! Bombing is terrible to endure, but it’s just one more atrocity in a long chain of many unless it hits exactly the right targets at the correct time.
So far recent ruscist missile tactics are proving somewhat more effective than the mass missile raids of the past, however Ukraine has been dealing with shortages of air defense missiles and already been moving to decentralize energy production in anticipation of Putin going this route, limiting their long-term impact. Moscow failing to accomplish the destruction of Ukraine’s power system during the winter of 2022-2023 gave Kyiv and its partners time to adapt, and though the pace is always too slow a full collapse of the grid remains unlikely.
If Ukraine’s partners would hurry another half a dozen Patriot systems to the country the situation would be much improved, and the arrival of AWACS aircraft will further limit Moscow’s successes - though Ukraine will need more than two. Some of the USA’s E2 Hawkeyes would be ideal - and as I recall, France has some.
Ukraine’s own strategic campaign is more comprehensive at this point and focused on more vital targets with a direct impact on orc operations. Fuel depots and refineries are key, as are logistics nodes like ferries and bridges. The steady destruction of S-400 and S-300 air defense systems is also essential; slowly but surely Ukraine is picking at the enemy’s vital systems, rendering them less efficient and forcing Moscow to scatter its defense efforts. Airfields are juicy targets too, especially those in occupied territories where HIMARS can now strike anywhere with only minutes’ notice. Long-range surveillance drones, long a problem for Ukraine, are beginning to appear with greater frequency in orc skies.
Using geography against Putin is essential to defeating him. In his own way he’s playing a similar game, recently threatening to position missiles all over the world and sending some ships to Cuba to support his point. This is a laughable effort, of course, as the entire sea branch of the orc military will cease to exist about seven days after the U.S. Navy gets the order to remove it from existence. If submarines are used Moscow might not even know for sure or be able to conclusively prove what actually happened.
But with Biden having both ruled out World War Three and effectively defined this as any direct confrontation between US and ruscist forces, in Poker terms Putin is more or less able to see Biden’s hand. Partisans determined to defend Biden because of their hatred for what Trump represents have backed themselves into a terrible corner. The only way to break out is to ensure that Ukraine is finally able to field enough combat power to win back its lands whatever the outcome in November.
Generating Combat Power - Moral And Material Dimensions
Power is energy given tangible form. Different parties to a conflict will bluff that they have a lot of it because perception of power matters more than the reality of the thing until put to the test through action.
Raw combat power alone isn’t everything. The USA has the ability to project power anywhere on the planet and a couple thousand active nuclear weapons, but geography and the need for allies this creates means that America’s power is diluted when put into action. It might have eleven supercarriers, stealth bombers, and dozens of ground brigades, but only about a third can ever be deployed at once without severe consequences.
The USA was unable to secure the victory it aimed for in either Iraq or Afghanistan despite two decades and trillions spent. Similarly, US power failed to deter Putin from invading Ukraine in the first place. It could do nothing to protect Israel from Hamas and the tunnels under Gaza remain inaccessible to Israel’s combat power. The USA sends warships through the Taiwan Strait every few months, a place where they’d be swiftly annihilated in any actual war, yet won’t protect civilian shipping carrying food across the Black Sea. For over half a year the US has been unable to stop the Houthis from launching missiles at passing cruise ships. Going back further, Vietnam and Korea were well-known demonstrations of the limits to US power, but incidents like the Iran Hostage Crisis and the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary during the Cold War stand out too.
Power has to be wielded effectively to matter, and also comes in different forms. Combat power, strictly speaking, consists of resources and capabilities organized to destroy an opponent’s own. While difficult to precisely measure, with essential moral elements like culture having a constant invisible effect, combat power is generally predictable within certain bounds. Using combat power at the correct moment is the essence of operational art, which in turn aims to achieve strategic goals at minimum cost.
Systems that persist tend to be those that make better use of the power available to them over time. That’s part of why the moral dimension to warfare can’t be ignored - models predicting Ukraine’s swift defeat in 2022 appeared to have lacked appreciation for this factor.
To assemble, increase, or repair combat power, both material and moral dimensions have to be addressed. You can have a lot of guns, but how, when, and why they are put to use matters. Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen served as an object lesson in how little having high-tech US equipment matters if it’s operated by conscripts led by twits with lots of medals.
The material aspect is the simpler of the two in Ukraine’s case because the equipment it needs exists, it’s just being hoarded under the excuse of some other crisis erupting. Which is silly, because you simply don’t need a large mass of ground troops to respond to any other conflict except one with Putin’s empire.
In a hypothetical conflict with China the only prospect of an extended ground campaign is in Taiwan, which isn’t big enough to support numerous allied formations and hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Some islands in the Western Pacific might be contested too, but large numbers of personnel with hundreds of armored vehicles still won’t be involved. It will be hard enough to supply a bunch of Marine detachments playing Maginot Line well on the wrong side of the power gradient in the region.
In the Middle East, neither the USA nor any NATO country but Turkey is likely to deploy large numbers of ground troops in that morass ever again. They’ve learned their lesson, it seems, failing even to preserve an independent Kabul free from Taliban control. Pretty ironic how sovereign borders mattered in Afghanistan in 2021, but the US is clearly willing to have Ukraine give up Crimea and Donbas, huh?
Europe is the only region where a large mass of ground forces is needed, and mostly because of the existence of so many old Soviet Cold War stockpiles. Half or more is gone, with the rest of increasingly dubious quality. And so long as Ukraine is tying down over half a million ruscist troops, it’s inconceivable that Moscow could free up more than one or two hundred thousand at most to threaten Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, or Poland.
Sweden and Denmark might be a bit anxious about islands of theirs that sit across the Baltic from Kaliningrad, but Moscow’s ability to mount amphibious operations was weak before the war and much diminished now. Ukraine has knocked out most of the landing ships of the Black Sea Fleet, which had been augmented by others moved there before the war. Taking Crimea in 2014 was possible only because Ukraine had leased so many bases to Moscow after the end of the Cold War.
There are six possible fronts that Moscow could open up: Norway and northern Finland, southern Finland, each of the Baltic States, and Poland between Belarus and Kaliningrad, the famed Suwalki Gap. But there’s no way that it could hope to throw a hundred thousand soldiers at any one given logistics constraints. A corps-strength formation of 20-30,000 similar to the one used to attack in Kharkiv this past month is probably all that could mass on a front without becoming too vulnerable to NATO long-range weapons.
All NATO needs for any front is three combat brigades backed up by a squadron of multirole combat jets. One brigade in each sector can be provided by the host country, another by the USA, and a third by one or more European partners.
If each maintains a single battle group consisting of about a third if its total strength, the rest able to deploy within two weeks of receiving a warning of ruscist troops massing, that will ensure no sneak attacks with smaller size forces is viable. Moscow will have to tip its hand ahead of any bigger move, allowing NATO time to beef up forces.
A single brigade has about 6,000 personnel, 30-40 tanks, 20-30 artillery pieces, and 120-150 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers. The US has over three dozen on active duty, not including Marine Corps regiments, meaning that just a third of six different divisions would need to be permanently assigned. The US could easily contribute enough gear for one or even two dozen Ukrainian brigades from reserve stocks without unduly harming global commitments.
Equipment well in excess of this six-brigade NATO requirement is almost certainly available across the alliance. Sweden, a country of under 11 million people, has just announced the provision of 150+ additional armored personnel carriers on top of the 50+ CV-90 IFVs that it has committed already. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Britain all have larger populations and military inventories. France alone was recently estimated to have up to a hundred Leclerc tanks and a thousand older VAB APCs.
As far as aircraft go, forward deploying a full US carrier air wing plus associated Marine Corps assets gets you three Super Hornet and three F-35 squadrons. There’s not much point in having a carrier pick up its air wing as it leaves the East Coast when it will mostly hang around the North or Mediterranean Seas anyway.
The simple fact of the matter is that Ukraine is Europe’s active front line. Only if Ukraine is forced into a bad ceasefire deal will Moscow ever again have the spare resources to focus on an alliance member. Aside from the smallest possible hedge against Putin going totally nuts, every piece of NATO kit not placed at Ukraine’s disposal is a tragic waste.
About six to eight weeks from now newly mobilized Ukrainian soldiers, many younger than the average, will be finishing basic training and in need of gear to prepare for their first deployment in fall. To make pulling them from the economy worth it as well as limit casualties, they have to be given proper gear. It exists, but NATO and US leaders have to stop using the danger of another crisis as an excuse not to end this one.
The moral aspect of combat power, which includes training and organization, is vital but more difficult to evaluate. A great deal of media attention has been paid to the alleged exhaustion among Ukraine’s ranks, and there can be no doubt that hundreds of thousands of soldiers are weary beyond words. However, there is also no sign of widespread refusal to fight. Recruiting offices don’t overflow any more because that’s just how it is in a long war: anyone enthusiastic to fight was already in uniform by 2023.
If you read a lot of Ukrainian soldier interviews what stands out the most is their frustration at not being as well equipped as they know they could be. Day in and day out Ukraine’s veterans see how they could exploit the manifest vulnerabilities in the orc military system to get this war over with a lot faster. Allegations of training deficiencies among Ukrainian troops are not entirely incorrect, but sadly blown out of proportion by media personalities, especially those made by non-Ukrainian military “experts” on TV eager to blame the users for Abrams tanks being more vulnerable than advertised by the company that makes them in Ohio. However, that isn’t to say training deficiencies aren’t a very real issue; this is a natural consequence of rapidly expanding a military.
A big part of the reason why German units of a given size were more effective in combat than their rivals through much of the Second World War comes down to the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First. Limiting Germany’s military to a skeleton force, the new Reichswehr kept only the highest performing officers on the rolls. They knew that within ten or twenty years Germany would break free of Versailles and re-arm; the goal was to preserve as many of the hard-won lessons of the last war and be able to swiftly regenerate a national fighting force when the time came.
Ironically, given the portrayal of the Germans as a bunch of Nazi brutes early in the war, the regular army was one of the more egalitarian military organizations the world has ever seen. Officers were expected to live and work alongside enlisted soldiers with a minimum of class distinctions - a residue of the horrible experience of the trenches, where bad officers acting like characters in a pop history novel got so many people killed. Though class was not fully extinguished, its impact was highly constrained by a military ethic which held that responsibility for taking the initiative lay with every single person.
It was even considered entirely correct to openly defy orders from a superior whose commands didn’t accord with the situation. A major reason why France and Britain were defeated in 1940 was the fact that German officers like Guderian and Rommel explicitly ignored instructions from both Hitler and their own military superiors to push as far behind French lines as they could. Sometimes they literally pretended to be out of radio contact. Their blatant insubordination is a big part of what carried the fight to the Channel and made the sacrifices of D-Day necessary.
Modern warfare has steadily transformed the role of the officer into a kind of occupational specialty. Once needed to maintain rigid control of formations that had to act in perfect unison to achieve weight of fire in a battle, Command still serves a vital function, steering the organism without actively controlling its elements. There’s simply no other way in a world of cheap information, where distractions and confusion make attention as scarce a commodity as ammo or fuel. Training leaders who understand this is a major challenge.
In addition to training Ukrainian soldiers in the techniques that will keep them alive on the battlefield, new officers have to learn how to coordinate the units they are responsible for to achieve emergent effects. That’s what working in teams is all about: two people can achieve more together than either could apart, assuming an ability to reliably communicate and the cultivation of a bond of trust. No one survives alone, in life at large or the battlefield. People have to eat and sleep; they can’t be on alert and engaged all the time. Teams are required to keep people alive, but they also have to be kept to a limited size in a world where detection and destruction are so closely linked.
The intellectual development of officers is one of those vital defense issues that doesn’t receive nearly enough public attention. Military affairs remain far too isolated from general scholarship. That’s part of why I’m so interested in games and simulations as training tools for lay and professional audiences alike - something I’ll write much more about in the near future.
How a military views its officer corps is one of the major tells that reveals much about how it fights. A recent Moscow Times piece (I know, right?) offered a brief but compelling confirmation of how orc officers operate. In summary, they sit well behind the front lines looking through camera feeds and tell mobilized orcs where to go die. They’re like George Jetson pushing his button to make a conveyor belt go all day long, in some cases giving speeches telling a bunch of dead men walking that they can be consoled by knowing that future russians will remember them as heroes.
If cattle could talk, this is what the slaughterhouse operator would tell them to keep them calm in their last moments. A huge proportion of orc casualties are men sent to act as literal meat shields, forcing Ukrainian positions to reveal themselves and run low on ammo so that glide bombs know where to land and less expendable orcs have a chance to move in close and seize some dirt.
This is motion for the sake of it; the only strategic logic behind these tactics is the desire to bleed Ukraine dry. The partner effort is the ongoing international campaign to portray the conflict in Ukraine as pointless, discouraging additional military support while pressuring Ukraine to accept a ceasefire that would only give the orcs a chance to catch their breath.
Putin pretends that russia is unbeatable then yammers and bleats about nuclear war in an explicit effort to play into old stereotypes about russia. On the one hand russia is the most civilized country on the planet and a match for any rival power, on the other it’s threatened by malevolent enemies seeking its destruction from outside and in. Apparently Muscovite culture doesn’t perceive how silly this looks to outsiders any better than the Americans who bleat on about the USA being the sole superpower after losing to the Taliban.
Moscow’s operations are constrained by an inability to do more at the tactical level than attack wherever resources are available as well as a strategic commitment to sustaining the illusion of strength. If it weren’t for leaders like Biden dancing to Putin’s tune this war would have been over long ago. Unable to achieve sustained tactical successes at the necessary pace or adopt a sensible strategic approach like going over to the defensive while proclaiming victory because the land bridge to Crimea still exists, Putin will prosecute the war like this until his forces suffer another spectacular collapse somewhere.
In turn, all Putin’s orc officers can do is keep on as they are, reporting that their subordinate formations are exhausted when the time comes. No blame appears to fall on an officer whose troops suffer high casualty rates, while one that fails to advance as ordered is punished and tagged as corrupt. One of Ukraine’s ongoing challenges is to minimize the appearance of this kind of rigidity in its own formations, because it stifles the creative spirit required to quickly adapt. This is calcifies combat power with natural effects visible across the orc military machine.
Though NATO doctrine is no longer suitable for modern warfare without a serious overhaul, one of the gems it inherited thanks to close study of why the German army historically punched above its weight is the concept of officers serving a largely functional purpose. Naturally, half a century of institutional cholesterol has built up, bad habits that undermine the true power of this idea. But it’s still there, especially in the emphasis on taking the initiative wherever possible.
In a world where ubiquitous drone surveillance offers the impression of extreme levels of command and control, it’s essential for officers to keep in mind that they always know less then they think. It will be creative, adaptive, pragmatic leadership that enables Ukraine to put the orcs on the back foot once and for all, leaders enabling soldiers on the front lines to take action as fleeting opportunities present.
Biden And Ukraine
Unfortunately this flexibility will continue to be lacking in Ukraine’s biggest ally, I’m afraid. Every time Biden takes one step forward he manages to stumble right back again.
Many observers have noted over the past few months that getting Ukraine weapons won’t matter if it doesn’t have troops available to use them. Ukrainians have been understandably asking the inverse: how can you expect us to put hundreds of thousands more people on the front lines when those already there still lack modern gear presently sitting in warehouses across the democratic world?
Alliances are supposed to be partnerships. The Biden Administration keeps treating Ukraine like a patron in private while saying nice things in public.
Consider that it’s a whole lot easier to convince a Ukrainian twenty-something to sign a contract that will take them to the front lines if they know they’ll get proper gear and training first. A person can accept the risk of not living to experience a free Ukraine if they know that everything possible has been done to minimize the odds of becoming part of the butcher’s bill. It’s the least that the rest of the world owes Ukraine’s defenders - who, it’s important to keep in mind, are fighting for the entire free world - that they get every piece of kit they can possibly use.
While freedom rhetoric gets thrown around by politicians too often, especially around the anniversary of D-Day, in Ukraine it is the plain simple truth. Putin’s regime represents the same systemic malignancy as the Nazis or any other imperialist movement. Whether directly or through the worldwide knock-on effects, so long as the monster is allowed to rampage we’re all trapped in the nightmare. If the conflict ever does goes nuclear, it will only be because the free world feared escalation for so long that Putin believes bluffing readiness for apocalypse by setting a nuke off in Ukraine is reasonable because Biden won’t risk World War Three under any circumstances.
Ukraine would already have won this war had the Biden Administration offered appropriate support much earlier on. Though many have rightfully criticized the team around Joe Biden, the hard truth is that he is the nexus of all the problems with this administration. An interview in TIME magazine this week - about as friendly an audience for Biden as you can get - offers a stark portrait of his actual thinking about Ukraine.
Biden has chosen to send Vice President Harris and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to attend Ukraine’s Peace Summit in his place. Like Xi Jinping of China, he didn’t see fit to attend person. Why? Mostly because he’s distancing himself from Kyiv in an attempted pivot to a political center that doesn’t exist.
If you read the man’s own words in the TIME piece, the fact that he’s somehow responsible for America’s nuclear arsenal ought to be as frightening as the prospect of another term of Trump. Joe Biden’s essential con is that he’s Scranton Joe, not a well-heeled lawyer who never served in the military and spent most of his life representing the banks of Delaware in the Senate. Allies sell this ridiculous fable of him being a humble guy who is always underestimated because of his stutter, but it’s just a tactic.
Whether it’s that, a cold, or some other excuse, Biden’s inability to speak the English language any better than Trump does is routinely given a pass by journalists. They - always eager to hold open the door to another interview - allow him to play a classic politician’s rhetorical trick of saying something controversial then pretending it was just an accident. His aw shucks affect always falls away when confronted by hard questions because he’s used to being insulated from any real criticism. Anyone who comes after him gets attacked by one of the many surrogates he cultivated across four decades of being a consummate D.C. insider.
Biden simply does not live up to the standard that any American or ally has a right to expect from the leader of the free world. At this point, Ukraine stands a better chance of successfully negotiating the chaos of a second Trump term than getting Putin out of Biden’s head before it’s too late.
Here’s the paragraph that really sticks out:
Biden: Peace looks like making sure Russia never, never, never, never occupies Ukraine. That's what peace looks like. And it doesn't mean NATO, they are part of NATO, it means we have a relationship with them like we do with other countries, where we supply weapons so they can defend themselves in the future. But it is not, if you notice, I was the one when—and you guys did report it at TIME—the one that I was saying that I am not prepared to support the NATOization of Ukraine.
Biden defined victory in Ukraine not as the restoration of its sovereign borders, but russia being unable to “ever, ever occupy” the country… even though Ukraine has been partly occupied since 2014. Apparently NATO membership is negotiable too. This was a deliberate rhetorical choice that represents a cruel and abject betrayal coming so close to his comments in Normandy to mark 80 years after D-Day.
That American veteran who told Zelensky that he’s the defender of the people is absolutely right. Would that the USA could produce politicians even a tenth as competent in performing the duties of their chosen profession.
Setting aside Biden’s apparent cognitive issues, the only way that Ukraine won’t face any future threat of occupation by russia is if the latter country ceases to exist, because Putin doesn’t accept that Ukraine is even real. This is not an objective that Biden will embrace, not when he believes that diplomacy is about personal relationships and has - again in his own words - known Putin for forty years. Biden’s words give the distinct impression of a man who sincerely thinks that it’s still 1988 and Ukraine has just broken away from the USSR, destabilizing the convenient stalemate the Cold War seemed to have evolved into before the charade collapsed.
Just like George Bush senior going to Kyiv over 40 years ago to argue against Ukraine seeking independence in his famous “Chicken Kiev” speech, Biden is accustomed to seeing a giant blob on the map ruled by Moscow. He wants to take credit for the massive damage that Ukrainians have inflicted on Putin’s military but also reference corruption in Ukraine, one of Putin’s favorite propaganda points.
Corruption is something that I suppose Joe Biden would know about, given that his family appears to have had business dealings in the country for a long time. An interesting choice, if you are concerned about corruption. But something you soon learn, if you ever study corruption in formal political science terms, is that the most commonly used definitions of the thing are set to exclude behaviors that rich people engage in all the time. The USA is as functionally corrupt as Ukraine.
Biden, Trump, Kennedy Jr., and entire for-profit partisan nightmare together constitute a severe domestic threat to the Constitution. I don’t make this allegation lightly, either, because I swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution once upon a time. And rich Americans don’t get to “educate” the rest of us about what that means without our having a choice in the matter.
Partisan Americans interpret and apply the Constitution however their donors prefer in exactly the kind of situation the Founders dreaded. Small wonder a dangerously high number of younger Americans see the USA as “a dying empire led by bad people,” according to a recent survey. Or that most Americans under the age of 60 are certain that life will be worse for them than it was their parents.
Ukraine has been the truest test of Joe Biden’s claim to be an effective leader, and he has been found sorely wanting. Thousands of Ukrainians have died because all he truly wants is the status quo of 2021 restored. Whether Ukraine loses territory or gets justice for the wrongs done upon it matters not one whit to Biden because he’s a true believer in the American social pyramid scheme where those who make it to the top have a God-given right to dictate reality for the rest.
In this setup rich Americans are at the top, lower classes of whatever identity are expected to patriotically support them with their tax dollars, and foreigners are useful idiots to be pitied and/or exploited depending on where they fall on an ally-enemy divide based on whether their leaders play ball as D.C. demands. The situation in the USA is utterly disastrous: Putin is laughing, seeing his last hope of victory clinging to life. Trump will sow chaos, while Biden will remain paralyzed and content with the trappings of the office he has coveted all his life. Neither is ideal, but the former leaves at least a chance of forcing positive change on the situation thanks to his own inept style of governing.
If Biden is unwilling to mobilize the vast resources at the disposal of the USA, NATO, and global allies to turn the tide in Ukraine once and for all by autumn, then he should immediately resign and give America a few months to test drive Kamala Harris. Given that he’s almost certain to lose in November anyway the country could do worse. If Biden is somehow re-elected then she’s likely the leading Democrat in 2028, and if his health declines much further before 2026 she could theoretically finish out his term and then go on to win two of her own for a full decade in office. Since the Democrats obviously don’t feel that an open and competitive national primary process matters in selecting the most qualified candidate, this could well be the master insider plan.
Truth be told, if polls asked whether voters preferred a randomly selected Democrat to Trump, the orange guy would likely lose. Harris doesn’t do better than Biden in polls mostly because the two are seen as synonymous, the VP position being basically a joke in US politics. On her own, with the media honeymoon the scenario would entail, she might turn things around. Being a woman running for high office in the USA, a hard line on foreign threats would be mandatory.
If Trump is smart enough to pick Nikki Haley as his VP in 2024, Biden-Harris is finished. It’s a sign of how far down its own authoritarian road the Democratic Party has gone that Biden hasn’t been pushed aside already.
In reality, America’s deepening geographic-cultural divides, both North-South and West-East, are fragmenting the country politically. In partisan terms, only a dozen states are competitive at any level. Most states are dominated by one party or the other at every level of government. Neither team is strong enough to win, but both gain by presenting the other as a mortal threat to freedom. Division is the natural result.
Frankly, I have long held that the best solution to the USA’s federal dysfunction is to split up the federal government. Let half a dozen regional groupings of states have the Constitution and the right to apply it as their own residents demand. Manage the nuclear deterrent, federal reserve, and right of travel from D.C. through a Council of Presidents or something, but everything else gets handled on a regional basis - foreign policy included. Let the West Coast Defense Forces handle the Pacific. Whoever wants the “Indo” brief can have it. It should be Indo-Mediterranean anyway.
However the future of the US federal government plays out, Ukraine and other allies need to cultivate deep contacts with state level leaders as quickly as they can. Most American states are so haphazardly run that they could benefit from some international contacts. Fortunately, support for Ukraine is one of those rare bipartisan issues in the USA that unites most sane people, especially those from families with military veterans.
Most understand that if Putin will risk an all-out war with the USA over Ukraine, he’s bound to over some other issue when the time is right. It’s always better to fight on your schedule as opposed to the enemy’s if battle is inevitable. It isn’t with China, yet, but russia, in Putin’s own words, has no borders.
Drawing down America’s old Cold War stockpiles isn’t a big ask when the threat russia poses to the US and its allies is diminished by the hour. Before November Ukraine can have troops along the peninsula connecting Crimea to the rest of Ukraine.
A victory like that would boost POTUS polls at a critical time. Trump could well pivot to a tougher stance on Putin just like Biden is trying to embrace Trump style tactics along the border with Mexico - there are hints of this already because Trump senses weakness.
All roads towards a better future are converging on a simple principle: victory in Ukraine. After more than two years of bitter struggle, it’s finally in sight. Ukraine’s allies need only take the last essential steps. They’re big ones, and do entail some risk - but far, far less than holding back now.
The biggest problem remains Joe Biden. Every shuffling step forward comes with another backward stumble. And with every promise there’s a hidden asterisk that usually comes in the form of delays, restrictions, or the simple inability to train more than 20 F-16 pilots in a year, according to a recent Politico piece.
Thank goodness Denmark appears to have matched that total at their training center. Another eight pilots are set to begin F-16 conversion training in Romania. Forty-eight pilots each making just a single sortie every day will add up fast. Assuming they get even a few of the model of AMRAAM missile with a 160km+ range, orc jets will start falling from the sky. Fewer glide bombs will come while ruscist helicopters won’t be able to snipe Ukrainian tanks. Restored artillery supplies will allow Ukraine to savage any target spotted by a drone. ATACMS strikes will hit the depth of the orc command and logistics networks near the front line. And when freshly trained and properly equipped troops arrive, defenses will start to crumble.
The past six months have seen Ukraine at its relative weakest, but its defenses mostly held. Once it has stopped Putin’s creeping summer push, it will be time to strike back hard. This war can end in 2025 with Ukraine’s victory and Putin’s defeat.