Retreat From Krynky: Ukraine's Dieppe?
This week, Ukraine confirmed a retreat that probably should have happened a while ago. While unsuccessful in the end, the operation still served a vital purpose. The many sacrifices won't be in vain.
Introduction
More than halfway through July, signs point to Ukraine launching new counteroffensive operations by September as Moscow’s summer campaign peters out. Zelensky suggested this week that the war could end by the new year, and he’s right. Given the support it needs and deserves, Ukraine can break the orc front, plunging Putin’s military system into crisis.
That’s how you bring someone to the bargaining table, sometimes. Japan didn’t unconditionally surrender to the Allies at the end of the Pacific War. Its leaders offered to fall under American occupation to avoid a Soviet invasion. That’s part of the reason World War Two hasn’t technically ended - Moscow still occupies Japanese sovereign territory, this control never codified by a peace treaty. Japan cut a side deal that allowed Emperor Hirohito to remain in his position while essentially replacing the Japanese military government with an American one.
Apologies to the many Americans who think the atomic bombs ended the war, but the Japanese Imperial Army was happy to sacrifice the entire Japanese mainland provided that its fiefdom in occupied China and Korea remained secure. It was the sudden and unexpected loss of the Army’s private empire to a massive Soviet invasion that made Japan surrender, not the threat of its cities being burned down in a few minutes instead of hours. Conventional firebombs killed almost as many Japanese civilians in Tokyo in March of 1945 as died in Hiroshima later that same year.
War is politics: the systems are the same. Putin will only stop coming when someone makes him. Fortunately, his military is burning through its resources at an unsustainable rate. The situation will change, and likely sooner than many experts presently seem to think possible.
It’s been quite a week in geopolitics as Putin’s grind in Ukraine continues to throw good money after bad with minimal results. The biggest news of all came on Sunday: Joe Biden has finally accepted the inevitable and abandoned his cursed reelection bid, endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris. This is probably good news for Ukraine for reasons I’ll go into.
All week long there came a drip of interesting reports that go a long way towards characterizing the course of the war over the next six months. An excellent paper by the ever-reliable Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) analysts Jack Watling, Nick Reynolds, and Oleksandr Danylyuk describes in detail what went wrong in Ukraine’s Summer 2023 counteroffensive. Also, Reuters published an in-depth look at the bottlenecks in producing artillery ammunition across the democratic world.
Long story short: the war against Putin is eminently winnable. It could already have been won if key leaders in the democratic world weren’t miseducated careerists pursuing their own narrow agendas, Jake Sullivan. The way media narratives about the Biden Administration over the past month so decisively shifted offers very strong support for my case that the media is also failing to accurately represent what is happening in Ukraine.
My contention that prevailing military doctrine in the USA and NATO is deeply flawed is also validated by the weight of evidence. Ukraine’s campaign in 2023 was all but doomed from the start by two factors: insufficient resources and an operational plan designed by committee. Political factors intervened in effective decision-making and planning from the outset, which reinforced both issues.
But both NATO and senior Ukrainian leaders have failed to recognize the urgent need to re-scale operations to cope with the Network Age. The spectacular armored breakthroughs of the Second World War and 1991 Gulf War were anomalous. Victory on the battlefield is a matter of creating absolute dominance at the tactical level to generate paralysis on the operational, one front at a time.
For Ukraine to win this war it has to get more military gear. But it also has to adopt new best practices for managing a battlespace that is far more chaotic at the ground level than pervasive drone surveillance and near-instant communication makes leaders think is the case. A major cultural and intellectual shift needs to take place among defense professionals before it’s too late, because geopolitical trends are heading in one direction: years of grinding, bitter war until a new settling point is reached.
Understanding the Ukraine War, or any other scientific problem, demands the application of a coherent theory to structure investigations. That’s what theory is for, and why I mainly use systems theory to power my analysis. The one limitation that RUSI reports run into, good as they are, is that they remain bound to a conception of warfare that looks too much to the experience of the latter days of the Second World War.
A deep dive into that demands its own post, however, at a future time. This week’s standard brief will touch on developments at the fronts before taking a close look at what the fighting for Krynky achieved and the implications of political developments abroad.
Key takeaways from this week, for those with limited time:
Moscow’s forces continue to press Ukraine’s defenders on the Kharkiv and Toretsk fronts, trading another 7,000+ lives for a few ruined villages.
Putin isn’t giving up on his hope of reclaiming a big chunk of Kharkiv, but the failure of operations at Vovchansk and Lyptsi bodes poorly for the future of orc offensive moves.
Ukraine pulled out of the Krynky bridgehead, probably months after it should have been abandoned. Lesson: either raid or assault when crossing a water barrier, don’t sit in a vulnerable bridgehead once it isn’t likely to move.
Long-range drone attacks are becoming a serious threat to the ruscist war effort, continuing to find new targets and poorly defended paths to hit established ones.
Poland and Ukraine have reached unspecified agreements regarding F-16s that appear to allow Ukrainian pilots to fly back and forth across the border. This will allow many F-16 maintenance activities to take place in NATO territory.
The US Presidential race just got real. Harris is in a position where she’ll almost have to be tougher on Putin than Biden. This could pull Trump and the Republicans away from the tacit alliance the Vance-Musk wing of the Republican Party has with Moscow.
Front Overview
The aviation front in Ukraine is still dominated by the wait for the Vipers, with a recent Muscovite claim of F-16s spotted over Odesa and explicit Romanian denials of these being Romanian jets leading to claims that Vipers are operating in the country. Zelensky, for his part, insists that Ukraine hasn’t seen them, which could mean pretty much anything if you take alternative translations into consideration. Like, if F-16 “delivery” according to some contract is taken to mean Zelensky shaking the pilot’s hand after they land in Kyiv, then it’s fair for him to say he’s not seen the F-16s yet even some are flying missions over western Ukraine.
If overseeing Viper integration efforts, I for one would want to have pilots doing touch-and-go landings on remote air strips to make sure ground crews have the routine of clearing the runway of debris down cold. You want to make sure that exhausted crews under fire can perform every operation on a checklist without fail; sometimes autonomy paradoxically means strict adherence to certain rules. U.S. Navy and Marine Corps aviators have lived this way since forever, which is why Ike didn’t lose anybody during its long patrol fighting the Houthis.
While it’s possible that Ukraine will base all its F-16s out of a base near Kyiv, under the protection of the capital’s potent air defense net, Moscow’s ability to get a few missiles through in any barrage means that distribution is a safer bet. F-16s in the very center of Ukraine will be more survivable if ruscist surveillance drones can’t spot them in real time.
In one bit of confirmed news, Poland has agreed to support Ukraine’s Viper operations. If aircraft that need major or time-consuming maintenance, like swapping out engines, can fly freely over the border, that reduces the risk of losing valuable people to a ruscist strike.
Moscow is now actively pursuing assassination and sabotage operations across Europe and possibly further afield, so no place is entirely secure. Fortunately, it doesn’t appear that Moscow is willing to risk open conflict with NATO by directly striking bases supporting the Ukrainian war effort from Poland. Not yet, anyway, and probably not ever, thanks to Ukraine. It’s pretty clear that, as degraded as his military is, NATO could wipe out most of Putin’s major conventional capabilities worldwide in a few days. His soldiers might make it to the capitol of a Baltic state, and there they’d perish or surrender.
Turning to the ground war, a number of Ukrainian sources suggest that Moscow is prioritizing the fighting in Kharkiv. There are likely several reasons for this. With limits on the use of US and NATO precision missiles inside russia proper still in place, Moscow has a convenient safe haven only 80km or so from the front lines. Aviation from bases just a fifteen minute flight from their glide bomb release points can play bomber carousel, unleashing a steady stream of the inaccurate but highly destructive weapons.
Moscow’s strategy relies on exhausting Ukraine’s resources, which leads to simultaneous operations on multiple fronts. Unfortunately for the orcs doing the dying, their officers fail to accept the obsolescence of standing ruscist doctrine. They’re still imitating Red Army tactics from the Second World War. Too many American and NATO officers would too, with similar results.
The northern wing of the Kharkiv front continues to see intensive fighting, especially Vovchansk - what’s left of the place. Ukrainian forces are reportedly maneuvering into position for a flanking attack on ruscist units attempting to, in their turn, outflank Ukrainian positions in the north part of the town. Moscow still has dozens of soldiers stranded in an industrial facility surviving on whatever can be dropped from drones.
The southern wing of the Kharkiv front has seen several attempted ruscist thrusts towards the Oskil river. Moscow’s aim seems straightforward: get around Ukrainian formations entrenched closer to Kupiansk and Lyman then use the reservoir section of the river as a shield for one flank. It ought to be tough going.
Ukrainian troops hold a series of ridges running mostly north-south, with gaps between usually hosting a water barrier that passes through a canyon. When ruscist troops try to outflank Ukrainian defenders in these lowland areas, they often wind up in kill zones.
The reverse slope behind a ridge is hard to hit from its opposite side, offering cover from direct fire. Whenever orcs crest the ridge they are extremely vulnerable to fire from the reverse slope as well as the next ridge over, making for solid ambush potential.
The issue that Ukraine faces with the Oskil is that the reservoir section is wide enough to make movement across difficult, so Ukrainian forces have to be supplied from the endangered bank. The railway linking Izium to Kupiansk runs on the eastern bank through Borova, and while Kupiansk can be supplied from Kharkiv, if Moscow did break through Vovchansk this route could become dicey. So Ukraine is unlikely to simply withdraw behind the Oskil to reduce the amount of combat power it needs to cover the area, as attractive an option as that is in terms of freeing up forces to fight somewhere else.
Toretsk remained the main focus of ruscist operations this week, Moscow acting exactly as expected. Which is to say, it’s still trying to secure the foothold it seized in the outer districts of Toretsk, push into Chasiv Yar, and secure the line of the Vovcha.
There has been previous little movement on the Chasiv Yar section of the front, just efforts by Moscow to secure more of the territory west of the canal that forms Ukraine’s main defensive front. Moscow continues to make small pushes towards Siversk, to the north, but no crisis appears in the offing at this stage.
South of Toretsk, between it and Pokrovsk, Moscow is keeping up the pressure on the Ukrainian troops still operating east of the Vovcha. The latter have continued their slow fighting withdrawal to the high ground on the west bank, presently holding only a hill top south of Novoselivka Persha that offers a commanding view in an arc from north to south. Ukrainian troops will likely be forced from this position five kilometers back to the vicinity of Komyshivka, but until then the same logic of defending a reverse slope as described above holds.
To the north the situation remains concerning, with ruscist troops occupying the small hamlet of Prohres. They also continue to creep towards Vozdvyzhenka, one of the few towns I’d say that Ukraine does need to fight hard for. If Moscow is able to push beyond to the vicinity of the highway connecting Kostiantynivka and Pokrovsk, that would be bad.
The occupation of Prohres is less significant, but troubling because it stands on a ridge line leading towards Pokrovsk and ought to have been defensible. I see any major orc attack in this direction as futile, but that doesn’t mean Putin’s goons won’t try punching through 47th Mechanized Brigade, which is overdue for a break after more than a year of hard fighting. If I’m wrong about Moscow’s intention to shift the weight of its offensive north to try and encircle Niu-York and Toretsk, the first step to getting across the Vovcha is to establish a foothold on the high ground to the north that outflanks the line.
I don’t think this will happen or work if Moscow tries it, because Ukraine should have a very powerful set of fortifications in place by now and it will get harder and harder to supply frontline units the farther they get from Avdiivka. But Ukraine still has to hedge against the possibility, as it does in a number of other places.
This includes the long Azov-facing front between the Dnipro and Vuhledar. There are some indications that Moscow might try to open up yet another axis of attack in an attempt to spread Ukrainian forces thin and prevent it from mustering reserves for future offensive operations.
Ukraine’s drone-based long-range strike campaign continues to reap rewards. So long as Moscow is determined to ignore Ukraine’s sovereignty, Kyiv has every incentive and even the responsibility to damage the enemy’s physical ability to wage war wherever pain can be inflicted without targeting civilians. And if you map out all the critical infrastructure that keeps any country running, it should be pretty obvious that there’s no way Moscow can fill all the gaps in its air defense coverage.
The best long-term solution to bomber drones will be interceptor drones, but Ukraine has key advantages in this kind of fight even if Moscow successfully adapts. With a smaller area to cover Ukraine stands a better chance of establishing drone defense patrols that can prevent most enemy drones from breaching friendly airspace. By contrast, Putin will have to cope with a steady stream of relentless hits on oil refineries, power substations, factories, and airfields in an infinite game of whack-a-mole.
Moscow’s biggest weakness is its essential centralization. Any society ruled by oligarchs wants big facilities that are easy to control. Decentralization is the antidote to authoritarianism, and fortunately for Ukraine, its own people will move long before the government gets involved.
All across Ukraine drone factories are hard at work, dozens of developers working independently to achieve specific and concrete goals. Moscow may be able to scale up faster than Ukraine, but no sooner do the orcs reveal a new drone than Ukrainians have turned out something clever of their own.
A fantastic report run in Euromaidan Press this week shows just how fast Ukraine is democratizing air support. While ruscist drones continue to take a toll on equipment in the field, pretty much every orc propaganda feed shows drones losing their control signal seconds before impacting an Abrams or Bradley.
In the Network Age, adaptive capacity nested at the lowest possible level is how a defense force can generate lasting power in several essential modes. A properly supported team can achieve incredible results.
However, one of the biggest lessons of this entire war has been that insufficient support will doom the best laid plans. Old Erwin Rommel, as it turns out, was dead wrong about what he insisted in his memoir: logistics officers are not in fact able to squeeze more performance out of the machine indefinitely.
Failure to appreciate the need to match local autonomy with adequate ongoing support is why the Afrika Korps, for all its stunning victories, ultimately went down in defeat. It’s also the root of the US and much of NATO abusing the German concept of Mission Command.
I’ll save that for another time. Here it’s worth taking a close look at the recently concluded battle for Krynky, on the Kherson-Dnipro front.
Krynky And Dieppe
News broke this week that Ukrainian Marines have abandoned their bridgehead across the Dnipro near Krynky. I was glad to hear it, though it is frustrating that the opportunity to secure a broader foothold over the river has been lost, at least for the time being.
A caveat is in order here: Ukraine still has teams fighting across the Dnipro near Krynky, mostly further downstream in the area of Prydniprovske. But the main bridgehead that had once pushed slightly beyond the now-ruined village of Krynky was evacuated.
Despite Ukrainian forces departing an area they fought hard to secure after losing a lot of people - over a thousand dead - the lessons learned will help Ukraine’s Marine Corps cross in force later on. The battle for Krynky looks a lot like a drawn-out version of the Dieppe Raid mounted by mostly Canadian troops on the German-occupied coast of France in 1942.
Considered a bloody debacle at the time, it functioned as an experiment that paved the way for the successful D-Day landings at Normandy two years later. The sacrifices made by so many soldiers in Dieppe were not in vain. May it be so with the fight for Krynky.
For background: since last October, Ukraine has maintained a force probably 100-200 strong across the wide Dnipro river below the ruscist-demolished Nova Kakhova dam. Several other small toeholds appear to have been seized as well, but this was the largest and came the closest to seizing ground that Moscow can’t afford to lose.
A road linking ruscist-held settlements up and downstream comes close to the Dnipro’s course near Krynky. It also passes through a channel of sorts between the woods and summer homes along the river banks and the Oleshky Sands, a wide and sparsely vegetated expanse difficult to cross. Plenty of FPV drone feeds show individual orcs being hunted down in the area. Seizing a bridgehead that cut this connection would leave several downstream communities vulnerable to being outflanked and taken before the orcs could respond.
The ruscist units sent to evict Ukraine’s Marines walked into a veritable drone swarm. Holding higher ground on the opposite bank, Ukraine also used tanks to directly fire on enemy positions. Had it been possible, Ukraine might have secured a lasting foothold on the far bank, built up forces, then broken through to Crimea.
Lacking enough artillery and air support, the attack bogged down in static positional fighting that began to make less sense as time passed. In December it was already widely known just how dangerous the business of crossing the Dnipro with supplies and replacements was becoming, but ruscist forces were being positively slaughtered. At first Ukraine had something resembling total drone superiority, but over time Moscow moved enough troops and gear into occupied Kherson to regularly pick off Ukrainian boats. Once town itself was literally pummeled to dust, marines had to make due with whatever the swampy forest near the river allowed.
It’s unclear how many Ukrainians fought in the Krynky bridgehead in total - I’d estimate ten to fifteen thousand. Never more than 100-200 were across the river at any one time, rotating back every few days or weeks, but personnel suffered an average of 2-4 fatalities every day. Upwards of three hundred confirmed fatalities were returned to friendly lines and over seven hundred marines are unaccounted for but presumed lost - many bodies fell into the river, making recovery almost impossible.
Moscow’s own visible losses amount to a brigade of equipment and at least several thousand fatalities. Adding in the injured implies that Ukrainians knocked out an orc division, assuming a roughly 1:3 casualty ratio in Ukraine’s favor. Moscow was forced to triple its troop strength in the region, drawing off far more soldiers than Ukraine committed.
It wasn’t a botched op, but as time went by and Moscow tightened up its defenses, maintaining the foothold just didn’t pay off. Refusing to accept this might well have contributed to the removal of a senior Ukrainian officer, Sodel, in recent weeks.
You have to take risks in war, but as soon as certain planning assumptions or safety conditions are violated, it’s time to call it and go home. Initially this operation had a lot going for it and made sense. It achieved a degree of surprise and if followed up might have secured a substantial bridgehead. But lack of artillery and armor support makes it extremely difficult to dig enemy infantry out of bunkers or houses.
Worse, dozens of glide bomb attacks each day made holding any position impossible. Ukraine’s successful wandering Patriot ambush of several Sukhoi bombers interrupted Moscow’s air support for a time, but the risk of being spotted by drones and attacked by Lancets or Iskander missiles means that long-range air defense systems - or at least their radars and control vehicles- usually stay a full 100km from the front, making it difficult to reliably intercept orc bombers before they release their payloads.
The mobility needed to evade glide bomb attacks was hindered by a lack of boats, which are the only means of transporting people and material over the Dnipro right now. Ukraine could construct pontoon bridges, but eventually glide bombs or drones would destroy them. Close support from air defenses is required to protect bridging operations, so to protect them Ukraine will have to have a Patriot battery and standing F-16 patrol along with substantial anti-drone defenses.
Even as late as this past spring I hoped that Ukraine would be able to disperse troops across the islands in the Dnipro delta and build up for a bigger push. The dense vegetation in the area and relatively high water levels in late spring could theoretically have allowed for so many boat trips backed by intense electronic warfare that ruscist drones couldn’t keep up. But if you don’t have enough boats, there’s only so much to be done.
Time is of the essence in amphibious operations, even more than in ordinary combat. Water barriers have a tendency to channel movement, with the wider ones requiring complex infrastructure to get ground units onto watercraft and out of them again. To cross a water body without a bridge demands carefully synchronized, rapid movements. In one island landing after another as it island-hopped across the Pacific, U.S. Marines discovered that there’s a single effective algorithm required to carry out a successful landing in force.
First you establish the ability to hit any target in short order. After a ferocious and comprehensive barrage backed by spotters, troops land in pulses and pursue extremely simple objectives that mostly involve clearing enemy positions. Ongoing fire support is required to minimize enemy artillery fire and prevent reinforcements from flowing to the beachhead, but it’s up to the troops on the beach to swiftly overwhelm all opposition.
You basically have to paralyze the enemy across a sector then assault it in depth to create a relatively secure protected area. Only then can heavier equipment land, at which point it needs to rapidly break through the containment perimeter the enemy is sure to set up.
Truth be told, this is becoming the basic model for how virtually all modern ground operations have to go. Drones make resupply so difficult and minefields restrict movement to such a degree that every attack is like assaulting a beach - there’s no maneuver aside from choosing there to strike and when to escape. This is bound to have the effect of making intensive and sustained tactical level fighting across multiple broad fronts a better way to defeat the enemy’s military system than a dense, narrow breakthrough.
The Dieppe Raid of August 1942 didn’t last as long as the Krynky bridgehead, but out of a 10,000-man force more than 1,000 were killed and 2,000 captured. Most of the casualties were among the 5,000 strong Canadian landing force, which fought well but was doomed by a bad plan.
There were several different reasons for the Dieppe operation. One was to draw out German air units in France and wear them down. Another was to help convince the Soviet Union that the Allies were making progress towards opening a second front in Europe, something Stalin was already implying had to happen or else he would consider a separate peace.
Ultimately, the debacle served as a vital learning opportunity that made the later Normandy landings in 1944 possible. Ukraine’s Marines fighting in Krynky these past months made a similar sacrifice, in addition to inflicting much more damage on the enemy in absolute and relative terms than the Dieppe Raid did.
There are infinite reasons why a battle plan can fall apart. No plan survives first contact, as the old saw goes, and in the chaotic battlefield of today plans pretty much always go awry. The key to success is generating highly capable, adaptable organisms that can independently suss out the best way to do harm to the enemy in their assigned area of responsibility.
All higher order echelons exist to enable the teams in contact to out-fight and out-think the enemy. They have to coordinate the array of support capabilities to ensure these arrive where they are needed when the time is right.
Ukraine is not done with operations across the Dnipro, not by a long shot. Though earlier this year I had hoped that Ukraine would be in a position to expand the beachhead by now, it is becoming apparent that the switch to a more aggressive posture is set to come in September. Moscow will have wasted more of its resources by that point, while Ukraine will finally be receiving artillery supplies in sufficient quantity to overmatch the orcs on first one, then additional fronts.
It will take until at least September for training and outfitting of fresh Ukrainian ground units to produce battle-ready formations. This is clearly underway, with some degree of internal reorganization having apparently created up to fourteen staffed brigades that now need modern equipment. In two months, assuming supplies arrive, this could be done. More than this are likely under repair.
Where they are committed, in what strength, and how effectively they operate will determine whether Ukraine can visibly turn tide on the ground by winter. Fortunately, a decentralized offensive approach won’t be as vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather. In fact, as Ukraine’s offensive potential increasingly hinges on creating periods of total dominance over a select battlefield, it may be those moments wen the weather happens to cooperate that sees Ukrainian forces make their most aggressive moves.
First, however, they need material support in the quantities I and others have been calling for since 2022. You don’t ask someone to build a house and give them only a fraction of the lumber they need. Unless of course your Ukraine policy is run by a guy putting on his best impression of Reagan circa 1988 and his pet Ivy League club of yes-men. That, however, will change in six months.
Geopolitics: Bye Bye Biden
The political stars that will govern the course of the Ukraine War through 2025 have begun to align. Though Europe has been rattled by the rise of neo-nationalist movements superficially sympathetic to Putin, most Europeans remain deeply skeptical of the dictator, even if they (especially the Germans) fear the consequences of a wider war.
France’s intriguing election result might make domestic policy a minefield, but that will only generate additional incentives for Macron to secure wins abroad. Britain’s Labour victory was weak, but Britain is in such tough shape that the only way to go from here is up, I hope. Germany’s Scholz isn’t going anywhere until late 2025, but hemmed in by Macron, Starmer, and the leaders of Eastern and Southern Europe, hopefully Germany’s reported plan to reduce how much aid it sends to Ukraine will be reversed.
And all of a sudden, on the other side of the Atlantic, the USA’s political scene just became very interesting indeed. It’s worth noting how fervently Biden’s backers attacked any prior suggestion that he wouldn’t be the party’s nominee. Newsom, Fetterman - there has been no shortage of ambitious hacks who hoped that proclaiming loyalty for grandpa Joe was a ticket to be named his successor down the line. And they didn’t even get a friendly heads-up when he finally saw the light.
Harris, after being deliberately sidelined, denigrated, and humiliated, is all of a sudden set to be proclaimed the Democratic Party’s last best hope. Thanks to two critical errors made by Trump since a random dude took a shot at him and missed, the entire electoral landscape has potentially shifted.
After running a disciplined campaign, Trump has failed to moderate his rhetoric despite being grazed by a bullet. He doubled down on dominating the Republican Party by selecting a weak acolyte who brings nothing to the ticket Trump didn’t already have. Vance has no governing experience, no real policy chops, and clearly no personal integrity, having compared Trump to Hitler yet now proving willing to appear on stage with him. Voting to ignore the Constitution on Trump’s behest after the 2020 election, as a military veteran, is an even better indicator of his lack of fitness to hold high office. Nikki Haley was a much smarter choice.
It is worth keeping in mind that while Trump was solidly ahead of Biden in the swing states that will decide the electoral college, he has always had serious trouble securing an outright majority. Most voters had entrenched opinions about Biden by this point and if you weren’t blinded by partisan tribal politics his glaring weaknesses as a candidate was always apparent. Harris, on the other hand, should benefit from a narrow window of opportunity to redefine herself in the public eye.
I’d say the odds in the 2024 presidential race just went from 90% in Trump’s favor back to a 50/50 proposition. Harris badly needs a better speechwriter and some coaching on how to not act like a clone of Hillary Clinton, who was until Trump and Biden the least popular presidential candidate in recent history. But the US public is about to be treated to Barack Obama levels of political hype. That has power, right or wrong.
Trump’s inability to capitalize on the incredible opportunity that shooter handed to him neutralizes much of the effect of his becoming a folk hero to some. Just like he treated his Covid-19 infection, instead of imitating Boris Johnson of the UK and using being laid low by the virus as an excuse to act sympathetic towards the tens of thousands of victims already lost at that point, Trump had to be the tough guy. This led to a notable drop in support among older voters, including Reagan Republicans, a shift further solidified by his attempt to overturn the election.
Biden lost these voters, but Trump isn’t wooing them back like this. Provided Harris gets a decent team around her that can avoid being blinded by their party’s own bigotry and delusions, Trump-Vance looks a lot like Putin: the thuggish facade masks exploitable vulnerabilities. I’ve rarely ever seen Democrats be able to step outside of their bubble in any serious way, but there’s a first time for everything.
The trick to getting voters who are otherwise skeptical of Harris and Trump to give her a chance involves defying their expectations about how she’ll defend herself against predictable identity attacks. Sexist and racist narratives are pushed by Team Blue just as they are Team Red: identity politics requires the existence of bigotry on all sides to survive.
You beat identity based attacks by ignoring them; the candidate who raises such issues must be implied to be crass and desperate, a subject of amusement with no lasting power. For Harris to evade the identity trap she has to maintain a tough-as-nails public persona, someone who can speak in universal terms about right and wrong, just and unjust. This does not mean “acting like a man,” but imitating successful political leaders like Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher, and Mette Fredericksen.
If you set aside political gripes with these and other like figures, what they all have in common is a pragmatic focus on getting things done. They present as a calm port in a storm, using simple, strong language that appeals to universal values. They also tend to be pretty aggressive on foreign policy.
Thatcher fought a real war over some rocks in the South Atlantic where a few British people and a lot more penguins live. Merkel may catch a lot of flak for the Minsk Accords, but Europe was in no shape to fight Putin back in 2014 and neither was Ukraine. Love her or hate her, Merkel helped keep the EU together through a bitter crisis, laying the groundwork for material support when Putin went for the kill.
Harris would swiftly find her presidency defined by Ukraine and other foreign crises. The USA is so visibly weak and divided that China, Iran, North Korea, and others are all going to test D.C. in the coming years.
With Trump they can bide their time, watching political tensions in the USA worsen and barter for what they can get in the meantime. An exception is Iran, where the deepening alliance between Israel and the Republican Party risks dragging the USA into a major conflict as soon as 2025 if Netanyahu gets his way.
Now that attacking Trump as an enemy of democracy will bring allegations of provoking violence against him, the best way for the Democrats to present Harris as a defender of democracy both before and after the election is to have her focus on Putin. A trained prosecutor is in an ideal position to advance a case against a recognized war criminal, and since Democrats believe Trump is an FSB asset anyway it’s a safe bet that if she says “Putin” the voters on the left who crave this rhetoric will be happy to substitute “Trump” and turn out in November.
Harris is a politician, of course, but I’d wager that she actually has her heart in the right place even when you might vehemently disagree with her policy choices. The law school formerly known as UC Hastings (it had a name change recently because the guy it was named after really hated indigenous Californians) is big into public service.
There’s a reason my wife spent years representing victims of domestic abuse instead of making big bucks in corporate practice or the IRS. Law school works very hard to train a mind to think a certain way. My wife no longer actively practices, but just as doctoral or military training intentionally alters how a person thinks, so does law school.
Unlike the majority of lawyers who go to Yale or Harvard or Princeton, if you came out of UC Law San Francisco you generally weren’t hoping to be President of the United States some day. Harris wasn’t born into this track, she just got a great opportunity to jump to the senate after serving as a state attorney general. A substantial portion of the opposition within the Democratic Party to Harris has always been rooted in elitist Ivy league types who have an odd inferiority complex when it comes to all things California.
I would go so far as to predict that Harris will make a better ally of Ukraine than Biden. There are limits of course, because what any Democratic president can ever do is shaped by the conventional wisdom created academic pundits like Paul Krugman work so hard to produce. But I very much doubt that Harris will be any worse.
With Trump there is always the chance that he’ll decide his own legacy requires making Putin leave Ukraine to look strong. However, if he listens to his VP, it could easily go the other way. Ukraine won’t be doomed if Trump-Vance wins, but the road will probably be harder going than if it’s Harris-Cooper or Harris-Kelly.
Guessing who Harris chooses for her VP is a fun game. My assumption is that she’ll need an older governor from a swing state. If the Democrats are smart they’ll read the demographic writing on the wall and focus on North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada - the so-called Sun Belt strategy.
Here the polls have been more likely to swing in the Democrat’s favor on election day since 2012, whereas the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have been going the other way. Of these, Michigan is probably Harris’ best backup target, able to compensate for a loss in Nevada and New Hampshire or one of the other bigger swing states. She can’t ignore the Rust Belt, but based on pure electoral logic that seeks to achieve a regional balance I see North Carolina governor Roy Cooper as among the most viable options, if a unity ticket with a moderate Republican is ruled out.
However, it remains necessary for America’s allies to prepare for an inward turn. Even if Harris wins, it won’t fix partisanship in the USA. It’s too entrenched along cultural and geographic lines. And the Supreme Court’s latest round of decisions appear to have gutted the federal government’s ability to regulate the states on a whole host of issues. Biden finally doing the right thing changes little, but in moments like these, any movement at all is better for democracy than staying frozen in place.
Sadly, the risk of the world dividing into opposing blocs that wind up going to war is rising. Even as American conservatives now openly question whether the USA would fight to defend Taiwan, they’re also warning Europe that it has to fend for itself. They’ll be in power again eventually.
If the EU really does build out its own independent defense policy and fund everything properly, within a few years the bloc will be substantially more competitive than the USA on global defense markets. This will be especially true if it partners with East Asia and builds factories in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. Trump’s transactional policy towards allies and enemies alike could easily lead to the USA falling into a nasty stagflation trap.
One of the interesting consequences of Putin’s assault on Ukraine has been the revival of the European project. Sure, loudmouths in a few countries always threaten to derail progress, but that’s been the EU since day one. Aid to Ukraine will keep coming from Europe, which has contributed as much as the US if not more at this point. European artillery shell production is supposed to reach 100,000/month by the end of this year, while the USA won’t get there until 2026. The Czechs are importing shells from abroad in similar quantities.
Even if the worst were to happen and America abandoned Ukraine, the war wouldn’t end. Victory would take longer, but Ukraine would still get there. Groups like ATESH are slowly mapping out the vital nodes that keep the ruscist economy and war effort going. Cheap drones are getting better and better at slipping through gaps in orc air defense network to inflict damage. The pain only increases from here.
Negotiations to stop the fighting have never in fact ceased. It’s just that talks are taking place on the battlefield. A leader in Moscow will only negotiate in good faith when he is left with no other choice.
Concluding Thoughts
So, it’s been a week! And the next six months are sure to be livelier yet.
In the future I’ll focus more on technical solutions to Ukraine’s challenges in going on the attack. By September it is likely that Ukraine will be attempting to advance in a serious way on one or more fronts. But the way it goes about this will and must look different than the template that defined operations throughout the Cold War.
Winning a decisive battle, a concentrated effort to destroy its combat power and leave it crippled, is still the objective of any military campaign. But the pace at which this can proceed isn’t always the same. Battlefields more and more resemble an ecosystem. There are faster and slower loops at play, and securing dominance in one, even a seemingly insignificant element, can cause a potent chain reaction.
To manage this sort of world requires a systems approach. The stakes are thousands of lives that could yet be spared before the end of this miserable, pointless war Putin has chosen to wage.
In the final analysis, he’s just another target too. And the hunt is on.