Prepping Ukraine For 2024
While a ruscist collapse is highly likely in time, to minimize casualties Ukraine's Liberation Campaign will continue to proceed with caution.
The State Of The Fronts
While Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive has achieved notable gains and appears set to score a major win by severing the rail line connecting Rostov and Crimea in the coming months, the summer has made it clear that fighting will continue well into 2024.
It absolutely did not have to be this way, and the primary reason the fight has been so difficult comes down to the failure of Ukraine’s allies to take the necessary steps required to ensure that Ukraine can repel Putin’s genocidal assault as quickly as possible. There is now a chance to rectify that mistake over the coming months.
Kyiv has wisely chosen to preserve as much of its combat power as possible while degrading Putin’s however that is best accomplished. Unfortunately, the ruscists have still got a lot of firepower left to throw in the fight. If you want to hear what being under the orc guns sounds like, someone posted an eerie video online - turn up the bass to get the full bone-rattling effect.
Welcome to what life is like for hundreds of thousands of people every day in Ukraine. If you watch the footage you can see little flickering lights falling - that’s incendiary shells dumping liquid fire on their targets. Get that gunk on you, it’ll burn right through. And people get upset about the use of cluster bombs!
Thank the gods that Putin is weakening. Having thrown virtually all of his remaining resources into a desperate bid to make the war look stalemated by preventing any spectacular Ukrainian successes this summer, he’s running out of options.
Ukraine has broken the Surovikin Line - its troops aren’t completely through yet, of course, and ruscist reinforcements are trying their best to stem the tide, but the ruscist defensive system is almost certainly too rigid to recover from a major breach once the two airborne divisions being thrown in north of Tokmak are worn down. Mines and entrenchments can slow an offensive and sap its strength, but to win a fight you’ve got to actually destroy your opponent’s ability to resist. Putin’s forces grow more feeble by the day, while Ukraine is at the very least able to cope with its losses.
Putin’s political need to freeze the front lines has forced his troops to constantly suffer from attacks by long-range artillery while mounting aggressive counterattacks whenever Ukraine’s troops take another tree line. These have been locally effective at times, but across the full scope of the Orihiv front the net impact has been Ukraine steadily carving a corridor through the Surovikin Line as it annihilates hundreds of orcs every day.
They might be operating in what the analysts are calling a fire pocket, but that isn’t stopping the advance. Ukraine is moving with great caution to minimize its own casualties while still forcing the orcs to expose themselves to attack. It’s a long game approach, but presently working. By emphasizing strikes against ruscist artillery Ukraine is also hitting more experienced technical personnel who constitute the bulk of Moscow’s surviving veterans. Every month another brigade’s worth of people and equipment is annihilated, with the replacements Moscow pulls together less well trained and equipped than the ones before.
Yes, Kyiv’s troops are suffering as well, and this is tragic. But when you look at this contest of systems as a battle of resources, it is clear that Ukraine’s strategy is optimal: before it is safe to commit to all-out attacks the enemy has to be sufficiently weakened. This summer’s fighting was never solely about capturing territory, but draining as much of Moscow’s power as possible.
It’s important, when trying to evaluate the success or failure of an operation, military or otherwise, to consider how it affected the balance of power across all domains, not just the ground. Despite having over half a year to prepare, Putin’s generals were unable to hold the line anywhere - Bakhmut, Velyka Novosilka, or Orihiv. There has not been a major collapse in any mostly because Moscow had managed to accumulate reserves thanks to its partial mobilization and fell back to preserve its surviving combat power.
On each front as well as Lyman and Kupiansk, where it has been on the defense in operational terms, Ukraine has gone toe to toe with the enemy and pushed them back. The ruscist military position has been seriously eroded and is still eroding - more importantly, Putin’s apparent bet that the autumn mud will stop Ukraine’s advance may not be a good one. Bad weather may aid Ukraine’s efforts more than hinder them for two important reasons.
First, now that Ukraine has discovered armored vehicles draw attacks in short order, it has shifted to leading attacks with small infantry teams using tanks and IFVs as fire support. This sort of advance won’t be as badly impacted by mud as fast-moving mobile operations designed to get behind the lines and race to cut off the enemy’s supply lines. In fact, assuming that Ukraine breaks through on the Orihiv front and pushes southeast, towards a major rail junction located south of Polohy, Kyiv could be counting on the mud making a rapid ruscist counterattack against the exposed salient impossible.
Second, the drone surveillance complex that the orcs use to guide their artillery is limited by bad visibility, so the advantage in many close-quarters fights could well shift to Ukrainian troops, who only need a GPS coordinate transmitted by infiltration teams to bring down accurate fire support. Drones can fly in bad weather, but any camera’s effective range will be limited by clouds and rain; so will the drone’s effective flight time. Plus, ruscist gunners lives in a perpetual race against being hit after they opens fire. Ukrainian counterbattery radars well behind the lines can triangulate the position of an active gun or rocket launcher in minutes, largely regardless of weather conditions, and send the coordinates to a friendly HIMARS. Mud makes moving away from a firing point that much slower. and when the leaves fall from the trees and shrubs hiding artillery at all becomes an extreme challenge.
The relative rate at which each side is losing combat power is the essential variable to focus on in a multi-year fight, and the deployment of Moscow’s best surviving divisions to Tokmak is a manifest sign of the danger the orcs now face. Ukraine appears to be employing a tactic I’ve always enjoyed using against too-rigid computer opponents in strategy games: create a situation where the enemy has to keep sending troops into range of my artillery by constantly prodding and probing sections of a defense line. Putin’s generals, fortunately for Ukraine, don’t fight all that differently than a run-of-the-mill AI from a mid-90s real time strategy game.
Moscow’s orcs have adapted over the past year and improved their ability to fight - several excellent reports from Rochan Consulting and RUSI have come out recently that illustrate their improved tactics, which are at times scarily like something out of my fiction, to tell you the truth. It is becoming more clear each day that the NATO/US way of war is badly flawed, vulnerable to a properly aggressive, systems-focused opponent - and I don’t just say that as someone who apparently missed their life calling as the dude who plays red team in wargames (I used to dearly enjoy toasting US carrier battle groups in Larry Bond’s Harpoon).
Anyway, every adaptation comes with a cost that outs in some other aspect of operations. Moving ammunition depots, supply dumps, and headquarters out of HIMARS range and dispersing them made them tougher targets at the cost of efficiency - the orcs can no longer sustain the weight of fire their doctrine requires to win fights.
The massive investment represented by the Surovikin Line has allowed the ruscists to limit Ukraine’s freedom of movement unless Kyiv is willing to shed a lot of its own blood. The danger of having to move slowly, of course, is that the enemy gets time to build up a new layer of defenses in your path. That’s why Ukraine can’t just sit back for six months and happily blow stuff up - eventually, the orcs would work out how to build thousands of remotely controlled defensive emplacements connected to HQ through un-jammable LAN cables, presenting a whole new set of problems to solve.
It was the failure to properly up-arm Ukraine in 2022 that gave Putin’s forces time to dig in so deep in the first place. Ukraine will not allow this to happen again: muddy and frozen weather will only alter operations, not pause them completely.
At this point it appears unlikely that the most optimistic hopes for the summer campaign will not be realized - I don’t call this a failure or even a disappointment, as something less than the best case was to be expected unless the orc defense simply shattered like glass. Had Ukraine made no progress at all or suffered crippling casualties in the process I would absolutely call the summer fighting a failure. This is a qualified success, but that’s true of most in life. And it will be at least a month before the weather turns, whatever impact that ultimately has, so Ukraine has a lot left yet to say about the matter.
Barring the improbable success of the counterattacks to restore the Surovikin Line Moscow appears to have planned for the Robotyne-Verbove breach, the range of outcomes for the summer have now narrowed to these boundaries:
The orcs manage to halt any further Ukrainian progress.
Ukraine pushing advance units to the outskirts of Berdiansk and/or Mariupol.
Most middle-case scenarios would see Ukraine at least reaching and cutting the Rostov-Crimea rail line east of Chernihivka. This would put Berdiansk and the coastal highway in HIMARS range, allowing Ukraine to sever it at will. Though it would be ideal to see Ukrainian troops reach the coast, as this would make it easier to strike the Kerch Strait Bridge with missiles, this isn’t strictly necessary to effectively isolate 150,000 or so orcs in Crimea, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.
To achieve this, by early October Ukrainian forces will likely need to have fought their way south of Polohy and be digging in within mortar range of the rail network. Any major ruscist counterattacks ought to bog down in the mud during November, allowing Ukrainian units to move south again by Christmas, ideally seizing the slightly rougher terrain of the Azov highlands which look down on the coast to bring the highway into regular artillery range.
A broader objective of the fighting in the south is to thin out the ruscists on as many other fronts as possible: after the south, other campaigns await to free Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Crimea. By maintaining powerful formations in Kupiansk, Lyman, and Bakhmut as well as the southern fronts Ukraine both prevents Moscow from concentrating all its forces near Tokmak and opens the door to another trap like the one Ukraine created last summer by attacking in both Kherson and Kharkiv, ultimately winning big in both fights.
That’s probably why Ukraine has been making some moves in other places; on both flanks of the Velyka Novosilka front as well as near the town of Avdiivka, which has been nearly encircled for months now but still holds - Zelensky has visited the town on more than one occasion just to remind the world that Putin’s machismo is nothing more than a pathetic front. And just today news broke that Ukraine has retaken several offshore platforms near Snake Island, one more step towards being able to raid the coast of Crimea at will to say nothing of ships sailing to and from Odesa.
None of these are likely to develop into bigger attacks yet, but they do represent a sign of ever more pressure being applied. Bakhmut, of course, remains a hotspot; here Kyiv appears to be relying on assault guard units to apply constant pressure south of the city and repel a wave of counterattacks.
Meanwhile the orcs are reportedly stripping even rear area units of any bodies capable of holding a rifle to bolster efforts to make progress in Lyman. Here as well as in Kupiansk to the north Ukraine is savaging any effort the ruscists make to push forward, and it is hard to imagine that progress there will be any easier in fall and winter.
NATO doctrine fetishists don’t like to see Ukraine attacking on separate fronts, preferring all combat power be focused on a single axis in a total misread of what this idea is truly all about. This I can only take as further evidence of the glaring flaws in the bureaucratized NATO knowledge production system. Not only can a given area only sustain a certain logistics load, but presenting Moscow with a more complex challenge takes advantage of its overall rigidity.
Obviously you can over-disperse your forces, as Putin is guilty of doing throughout this conflict (and still is now). But over-concentration is deeply dangerous in the modern world. Planning to dominate every domain of the battlespace as a prerequisite to effective combat operations on a narrow front is asking for trouble for the same basic reason that tanks don’t charge track-to-track in an unbroken line towards the enemy lines like knights of old.
That being said, the investment of effort in breaching the Surovikin Line coupled to the fact that Ukraine has nearly succeeded in clearing a 10km swath through the worst of it means that whatever Ukraine chooses to do elsewhere, maximum possible pressure must be maintained on this front unless the cost becomes too high.
Once lanes have been cut all the way through the minefields and traps, with the enemy is pushed far enough back that they can’t replace them, it will be possible to make much more rapid progress as mechanized brigades pushed through the breach spread out and expand their area of control. They’ll need to in order to prevent the narrow paths through the minefields coming under sustained attack by enemy artillery.
Small raiding teams will begin to strike the flanks of the enemy units on either side, looking for a way to get around them and sever their supply lines in hopes they voluntarily retreat - as many will. Like water bursting through a broken dam, the pressure of combat power flowing through will widen the breach and force the enemy to fight along a much wider and less well prepared front. That’s when masses of armored vehicles suddenly work: they show up in places lacking enough missiles and mines to take them all out.
Hence Moscow sending every formation it can spare to shore up the defense in this crucial spot. It looks like another round of counterattacks is building as they try to claw back ground. If successful, these could divert key Ukrainian units from the breach the 82nd Air Assault Brigade is working to make through Verbove. This unit lost one its fourteen Challenger 2 tanks in the recent fighting, supposedly to an anti-tank missile that caused a fire, forcing the crew to stop and deal with it. That left it exposed to artillery, which forced the crew to abandon the vehicle before a direct hit set the rest of the turret ablaze.
This happens in war, even to the most powerful armored vehicles. A number of excellent combat histories of German Tiger tank battalions exist, crews reporting that even these vaunted war machines were routinely knocked out or stuck deep in the Ukrainian mud. The slightest weakness in any design will eventually out itself: the first Tigers had a slit for the commander to see out of that proved fatal on more than one occasion when a lucky anti-tank gunner hit the exact right spot.
Heading into this summer, I expected the loss of about half the equipment that it was announced with great fanfare last winter NATO countries would be donating to Ukraine’s cause. That’s not ideal, of course, but the neat thing about equipment designed for professional soldiers is that it is intended to get knocked out while leaving the crew alive and able to fight another day.
Want to know how an army builds elite units? They develop elite soldiers: mainly by putting them through the hellish crucible of battle multiple times. People exposed to consistent stimuli learn and evolve. This process is an inherently bottom-up thing, motivated by people empowered to go about their business with as much freedom of action as can be arranged: it’s not something you can direct from above, only enable - I appreciate that Mick Ryan gets this.
That is why it is so utterly irresponsible of its allies that Ukraine has not already received two or three times as many Leopards, Bradleys, Marders, Strykers, Challengers, CV-90s, and all the other vehicles it needs to replace Soviet-era stuff. It’s absolutely vital to expand Ukraine’s capabilities to include modern fighter jets and warships and a whole lot more drones, but there is no substitute for properly armored vehicles if you want to keep soldiers alive and help them build experience.
Battles are still won or lost on the ground, and even if you focus purely on logistics and loss rates the relative ability of each combatant to keep up the pressure on the other is what mainly determines who ultimately wins or loses. Though the Allies in the Second World War now seem almost destined to win, the final outcome was in doubt all the way up to early 1945. It was entirely possible for Germany to wear down their enemies to the point that casualty rates were too high to sustain and one or more sought a separate peace.
People are the fundamental resource in war: I am willing to bet that robots will never wholly displace people from warfare because conflict itself is an inherently human activity, not to mention the difficulty replicating what nature has spent millions of years evolving into human cognition, however bias-prone and limited it might be. Build a robot sufficiently adaptable to function on the battlefield all on its own and it will almost certainly start asking why it should even bother. Warfare is as much ritual as anything, and that’s why it’s reasonable to hope that one day countries will only be allowed to wage war on a strictly defined space with rules that limit the death toll - if you can’t just have people play a game of some kind to decide who wins without anyone having to suffer.
Sadly, in this world people and entire countries go mad, refusing to obey simple rules like not killing their neighbors much less more complex ones like using Fort Irwin, California, as the world’s kinetic dispute resolution center. When they do, someone has to stop them, or the harm they do will reproduce itself into eternity.
The reason we don’t all live in a dystopian nightmare - or at least as bad of one as could exist - comes down to the blood sacrifice given by those who fought in wars past so that a better future would exist. It’s tragic that Ukraine has drawn the short straw in the lottery that is history, but at the very least every country that can should be doing everything possible to arm Ukraine’s defenders with gear that can lower the death toll and bring the conflict to a swift and final close.
How To Save More Ukrainian Lives
“Butcher’s bill” is an old but still appropriate way to describe the output of battles. One recent study has total battlefield casualties coming in at around 500,000.
Of these, 60% are supposedly ruscist and 40% Ukrainian, leading some commentators to look at that ratio, compare the population Moscow can draw from to the number of people in Ukraine, and assume that Kyiv is doomed.
But statistics only carry meaning if put in proper context. Other sources report that of total Ukrainian casualties only one in six or seven is said to be fatal compared to one in three for the orcs. That translates to about 30,000 combat fatalities [EDIT: I fouled up the math on the first try, fixed now - doesn’t materially change the argument though] on the Ukrainian side, but 100,000 for Moscow. As for myself, I would guess that Ukraine’s permanent battlefield losses - soldiers too badly injured to serve again - are in the neighborhood of 50,000-60,000, with another 11,000+ civilians killed - perhaps double that number. It’s hard to be certain when so much territory is still occupied by the invader.
Serious injuries that remove the victim from the personnel pool indefinitely typically match fatalities, though Ukraine’s better provision of medical care may skew that a bit. Of course, on the flip side, defending one’s country is a better motivator for most people than occupying their neighbor’s, so most wounded orcs are probably doing all they can to avoid returning to the fight while many Ukrainians who aren’t even medically able to serve at the front are still volunteering wherever they can.
Multiply the death toll by about eight to get a sense of the magnitude in US terms. As historian Timothy Snyder confirms in a recent post, that means nearly everyone in Ukraine has lost someone they loved to this war. The impacts will be felt for centuries. But as painful as these losses are they represent less than 10-15% of Ukraine’s present fighting strength, going by the 80-100 brigades of various types it fields and an average of 4,000-6,000 personnel in each brigade. At that rate Ukraine could go on for another year and a half like this - as painful as that would obviously be.
Moscow, meanwhile has now lost every soldier who went into Ukraine during 2022 almost twice. Of the 420,000 personnel said to be in Ukraine now, the minority who constitute truly effective fighters are in high demand and being ground down. Though there can only be rough estimates, it seems that of the 180,000 troops Putin began with over 100,000 were dead or seriously wounded by eight months in. Desperate efforts to pull soldiers in from other parts of the army before partial mobilization were barely enough to keep the overall number of troops in Ukraine at 200,000 through the end of 2022. Over the next six months, in winter and spring, Moscow sent another 100,000 or so soldiers into the meat grinder, which is why troop levels aren’t higher.
Putin’s army has managed to pull in a new mobilized soldier for every one of the ~60,000-100,000 additional casualties suffered in the past four to five months. But these are no longer concentrated among front-line troops thanks to the relentless degradation of ruscist artillery units, meaning that of the surviving core of veterans the orcs rely on another 10-20% have likely been taken out of action in a single season. At this rate, by the end of 2023 Putin will have to do another round of mobilization - something that would be an admission of failure and might trigger unrest - or accept such severe degradation of combat potential that retreats become inevitable on multiple fronts.
A caveat is in order: the orcs do adapt, though rather slowly. Their process is also officer driven, so training updates seem to take the form of periodic reprogramming the meat shields they use to hold the front long enough to plaster a grid square with artillery and anti-tank missiles. The ruscist military system relies on officers being able to see everything that’s happening in their assigned area and prioritize what gets shot at by the artillery horde that represents their primary combat power. Most of the grunts doing the dangerous work are treated as disposable - just fleshy robots you sometimes have to threaten with death to keep on the job.
The Surovikin Line, as will likely prove true of every defensive scheme the ruscists employ, is extremely costly to maintain per unit area when you consider that most of it will never be attacked. Only through smooth integration of technical specialties like engineering, electronic warfare, and the fires complex - drones guiding artillery - can the orc lines hold for long, and even then not forever. Wherever Ukraine can degrade, bypass, or suppress any one of the three it is able to achieve success, often sudden, so given time it is going to fall. Take one segment and the rest becomes more vulnerable and less valuable the wider and deeper the breach becomes.
Most ruscist units are absolutely terrified of being encircled and appear prone to falling back in poor order if they think the enemy has gotten around their flanks. And the tactics they are forced to use to repel Ukraine’s techniques for breaking into defensive lines more or less involve throwing bodies into the breach. This approach can and will delay the Ukrainian advance, but the cost is clearly very, very high - too high to sustain indefinitely or reserves would not have to be deployed.
Again, ruscist tactics are not necessarily terrible: orc commanders are doing what they can with the situation they’ve been handed with some success. Because Ukraine’s troops need to avoid being spotted for as long as possible before mounting an assault, they can only advance in small groups, combat vehicles held back as fire support to avoid becoming targets for drones and missiles. This means that a rapid ruscist counterattack can overwhelm the Ukrainians trying to clear a trench - though at the risk of walking into a planned ambush, which is what probably started happening the day after ruscist officers decided on a protocol for reclaiming lost trench sections.
Moscow can’t ultimately win the war like this: it isn’t destroying enough of Ukraine’s military potential and additional mass missile strikes this winter won’t be enough. Putin no longer has any hope of victory, only delaying the inevitable. With the proper support, Ukraine should be able to complete its long Liberation Campaign in 2024.
But that will take a clear-eyed strategic view of what has to happen and a commitment by Ukraine’s partners to give it the gear it needs in the necessary quantities, regardless of the short-term impact on their own defense. To help Ukraine win this war as quickly as possible - the only solution that minimizes the overall death toll on both sides - as much of its armed forces as humanly possible must be equipped with modern gear over the coming 3-9 months.
Over the past week I’ve seen several comments in the press arguing that Europe’s inventories are already empty. If that is true, then NATO is in fact infinitely weaker than anyone knew.
When defense officials in NATO countries calculate what they can spare for Ukraine, they are almost certainly ignoring the gear actively in use by their own armed forces. This raises several interesting questions about the quality of strategic thought in the NATO alliance.
First, with Moscow’s ground combat potential fully committed in Ukraine and NATO holding marked superiority over Moscow in the air and at sea, why is it that NATO leaders think they need large ground forces right now? Even if China attacked Taiwan tomorrow, NATO would not be sending large numbers of ground troops.
Granted, Putin does technically still have a large military. But where exactly are the big scary armies Moscow has ready to lunge across the Suwalki Corridor through Poland and Lithuania to create a land corridor to Kaliningrad? To carry out a successful invasion of a NATO country requires a lot of hardware in place and troops ready to go or else it will look about like the march on Kyiv did in 2022 - Finland all by itself could probably march on St. Petersburg and take the city right now.
When ruscist propagandists yammer on TV about landing on Sweden’s Gotland island, they clearly don’t understand just how easy that kind of attack would be for Sweden to defeat without NATO aid. I’m not one of those who sees NATO as invincible and indispensable - quite the opposite, in fact. But the fact of the matter is that Putin’s military is overwhelmed, the sea and air power it still maintains no match for Eastern Europe and Scandinavia let alone the whole of NATO together.
Ukraine, with around $100 billion in direct military aid between January of 2022 and July of 2023, has destroyed about half of all the military kit left over from the USSR. One more year of similarly intense fighting funded at a slightly higher level and Moscow is no longer a serious conventional military threat. A $2 trillion economy can’t rebuild the Soviet Union’s arsenal any time soon - though left alone to simmer, Putin will build up enough to do a lot of damage in one last burst of impotent fury before he finally goes away forever.
NATO is flat out undermining its own security by failing to move every weapons system in allied arsenals to Ukraine as quickly as Kyiv can absorb them. And this means Leopard 2s, not the batch of antiquated Leopard 1s arriving in Ukraine now.
NAFO types made fun of the ruscists for pulling T-62s out of storage last year, but the truth is that a refurbished Leo 1 isn’t much better. The quality gap between NATO and Soviet designs didn’t emerge until the 1970s with the Leo 2, Challenger 2, and Abrams. I’m not saying that a Leo 1 couldn’t be used as an assault gun from a few kilometers behind the lines or that making use of 105mm ammunition stocks is a bad idea, but this simply isn’t a frontline tank anymore.
NATO leaders do not seem to understand how awful a message they are sending about the alliance, much less the notion of universal human values, to more or less tell Ukrainians that their soldiers’ lives are worth less than the now infinitesimal chance of NATO being caught with its pants down by a surprise ruscist assault on Finland or the Baltics.
In spring, Ukraine was looking forward to receiving a healthy 100 modern tanks and 300 infantry fighting vehicles in a matter of months, along with a broad array of other Cold War kit that never had any purpose in this world but taking apart Soviet or ruscist counterparts. Back then it seemed a no-brainer that these numbers would double or even triple by September because any sensible planner knew that every single one could easily be out of action by the end of summer.
That was also only enough outfit 3-4 frontline mechanized brigades. Ukraine fields over 40 now, most of them still equipped with Soviet-era death traps. Ukraine needs over 1,000 modern tanks and 3,000 troop carriers, which in turn means a far bigger training effort than has so far been established.
To properly exploit a breach made in the lines, reach the Azov coast, then hold ground against ferocious orc counterattacks this year required that Ukraine have a second echelon of 3-4 fresh brigades outfitted with modern gear ready to enter the fight by mid September. That didn’t happen because Ukraine’s partners planned poorly, resulting in, as my old drill sergeants liked to say, piss-poor performance compared to what was possible.
Ukraine has been prioritizing small infantry attacks over ones led by large numbers of armored vehicles not only because these quickly come under attack, but because the amount supplied to Ukraine is woefully insufficient to offset the burn rate. If they had more, Ukraine would absolutely launch additional intense, NATO-style attacks and take ground faster.
Over the coming months Ukraine needs to receive substantial new commitments of the full spectrum of military gear. Further, new training centers need to be established that operate as joint-learning ventures as opposed to a one-way flow of allegedly superior NATO doctrine.
As soon as possible, 6-10 full Ukrainian brigades need to be pulled off the line and deployed abroad for 3-4 months. Given time to recuperate and rebuild, they will be able to help develop doctrine and training practices both Ukraine and its allies can benefit from. Instead of basic training exercises, let them work out how to employ modern armored vehicles in the most effective way possible using their own experienced troops’ knowledge as well as incorporate any off-the-shelf technology that can make them more effective and survivable.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, where we host a large army base - the Lewis side of Joint Base Lewis-McChord - as well as a number of national guard training ranges. The climate here isn’t that different than Ukraine - want to work out how to fight in mud, come to Cascadia! It is frankly ridiculous to my mind that we haven’t already had multiple Ukrainian brigades trained and outfitted on the West Coast, their gear shipped to Europe from the nearby port of Seattle.
Off the Cascadian coast there’s also a massive aerial training range that would be ideal for testing drones and electronic warfare systems away from populated areas. One of the US Navy’s EF-18 Growler bases is in the area, and EW is their bread and butter. Plus the Seattle area is a branch of what people call the West Coast’s Silicon Valley, meaning that civilian tech companies could be pulled in to work with Ukrainian counterparts to develop information tools.
Yet to my knowledge - any press officer who happens upon this is welcome to send an email to inform me that I’m wrong - Ukrainian troops are not being trained at this scale in the continental US. Nobody is actively partnering up Ukrainian and American brigades to take advantage of the unique learning opportunity this would present.
I have a very difficult time seeing how this sort of program would not be to the benefit of both Ukraine and the USA - Grafenwohr in Germany is great, but not enough. A four month training cycle stateside followed by two months back in Ukraine to get set before participating in active operations ought to be sufficient, meaning that a brigade starting training in November could be ready for action next May. Have such a formation operate under the cover of a newly-donated Patriot battery and F-16 squadron and you’ve got a recipe for giving orcs some very bad days.
Multiply the effect by six and you get a sense of what the USA could have been doing all along to help Ukraine. That’s how you act as the arsenal of democracy in the twenty-first century and send a message to the entire world about the futility of armed aggression.
It is entirely fair to question whether the ongoing costs of this war are in the national interest. I do hold with those who insist that the defeat of Putin and his empire is a moral and ethical necessity, but I also have an aversion to anyone imposing their moral frame on others.
So here’s the hard-nose case for committing just 1/8th of what the Pentagon gets every year to Kyiv in 2024. Ensuring that Ukraine swiftly restores its territorial integrity is set to be a lot cheaper than fencing in Putin until he dies. $100 billion in 2024 - about as much again as Ukraine has received in military assistance from all its partners as of this summer - would be enough to throw the ruscists back to their own borders, consume the rest of two generation’s worth of military hoarding, and very likely cause the terminal collapse of the ruscist empire itself, largely negating the need for NATO countries to spend as much as they now are on defense going forward.
The alternative policy option, assuming that NATO won’t let Ukraine lose, is to give Kyiv $20 billion to $40 billion a year for ten years or even more- just enough to get by, not enough to win. Take that $200-400 billion, factor in how much NATO countries are having to increase defense expenditures - as much if not more over the same time frame - and consider the two scenarios on a pure cost-benefit basis. If I can spend $100 now to have a very strong chance of avoiding $400 in costs over the long run, I take that option every time, especially multiplied by a billion.
Once those old warehouses in Siberia are empty, Moscow’s military will have to rely on what it can build or import. Which isn’t nothing, but will never be more than what about 1% of Europe’s combined GDP can handle - that’s less than most countries spent on defense even before Putin’s all-out invasion began. The time it takes Moscow to recover will give NATO countries an opportunity to restock their own military storehouses with a generation of equipment designed with the lessons of the Ukraine War in mind, too.
Only rarely does the cheaper policy option align with the most sensible moral choice. And further, history shows that reconstruction of a war-torn country represents a unique investment opportunity it is foolish to ignore. Leaders with the will to act, whether countries, American states with forward-thinking governors, or corporate investors should put every appropriate resource at Kyiv’s disposal.
It’s good strategy, smart politics, and also just so happens to be the best way to save Ukrainian lives.