Oh the shock and horror. McCarthy of the Freedom caucus cannot wait for Putin bombing Ukraine into the stone age for Putin victory. Not so simple
We can now see the shock and horror as Putin LOVER McCarthy of the House cannot immediately give his LORD and MASTER Vladimir PUTIN a guaranteed victory over Ukraine Moment by Spring 2023.
BOO HOO HOO, Mc Carthy. Go weep and wail and lose it, on the phone when you talk to PUTIN: For starters the Lame DUCK CONGRESS will give Ukraine at least 60 billion USD in aid, December, 2022. IMO, McCarthy, you can go have your scream therapy with conservative USSC justices and scream your little heart , but as Amy Barret of the USSC showed today, kookery does not have its day all the time. See when Barrett shot down the Loan forgiveness challenge TODAY, McCarthy
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Western countries are speeding up shipments of winter clothing, new rounds of artillery and counter-drone defenses to Kyiv as Ukrainian and Russian forces prepare for a months-long grind amid the mud and ice.
Both sides have fought to gain advantage before the freeze sets in, but Ukraine has moved fast and with discipline since the summer, executing quick campaigns that recaptured thousands of miles of territory that has them now pressing on the strategic southern city of Kherson. It’s an area that will see brutal fighting as artillery shells and frozen temperatures become the most feared foes on both sides of the front line.
“I think we’ve seen a real shift in the last three months,” one Western official told reporters on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Brussels last week. “The Ukrainians are on their front foot, and they certainly feel prepared for the winter campaign. The donation packages that are going to Ukraine are very much [focused on] the winter.”
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Amy Barrett is not an option here, i.e. the USSC cannot interfere with these deliveries, McCarthy
Next
BOMBING does not work, in addition as what will have to be explained to sobbing Freedom Caucus members...
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But Putin’s military advisers have likely explained to him that going nuclear will do little to change his losing game in Ukraine. Any use of a battlefield nuclear weapon would almost surely cause nuclear fallout to blow back over Russian military forces themselves, as well as over the civilians in Ukraine who support Russia. It would almost surely accelerate the collapse of Russia’s military positions in Ukraine and weaken Russia’s ability to defend its own territory from possible escalation. Put simply, Putin may now risk losing Russia’s positions in eastern Ukraine, but by going nuclear he could risk losing large parts of Russia itself. To paraphrase the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, this would be committing suicide for fear of death.
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In fact, this is turning into such a **** show, that the only gambit Putin really has left, is THIS
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Russia has mined the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant on the Dnipro River in Ukraine’s southern Kherson Oblast, setting the stage for a "large-scale disaster," President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday.
"We have information that Russians mined the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant," Zelensky said in an Oct. 20 address to the European Council,?the?Kyiv Independent?reported.
Zelensky's statement coincides with a previous assessment by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) that Russian forces are "setting information conditions to conduct a false-flag attack on the" plant. "The Russian military may believe that breaching the dam could cover their retreat from the right bank of the Dnipro River and prevent or delay Ukrainian advances across the river."
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If Putin does this, he will be branded as a new international OUTLAW, like ISIS , McCarthy.
Tough world is it not ?
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NATO is rushing equipment to Ukraine as troops hunker down for the winter
The war begins a new phase as Russia launches missiles and temperatures fall.
Iranian-made drones are pounding civilian targets and infrastructure, a civilian terror campaign that has already damaged about 30 percent of Ukraine's power-generating capabilities, according to Kyiv. | Roman Hrytsyna/AP Photo
By?PAUL MCLEARY
10/19/2022 04:39 PM EDT
Western countries are speeding up shipments of winter clothing, new rounds of artillery and counter-drone defenses to Kyiv as Ukrainian and Russian forces prepare for a months-long grind amid the mud and ice.
Both sides have fought to gain advantage before the freeze sets in, but Ukraine has moved fast and with discipline since the summer, executing quick campaigns that recaptured thousands of miles of territory that has them now pressing on the strategic southern city of Kherson. It’s an area that will see brutal fighting as artillery shells and frozen temperatures become the most feared foes on both sides of the front line.
“I think we’ve seen a real shift in the last three months,” one Western official told reporters on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Brussels last week. “The Ukrainians are on their front foot, and they certainly feel prepared for the winter campaign. The donation packages that are going to Ukraine are very much [focused on] the winter.” The official, like others quoted for this article, asked for anonymity to give candid assessments of the war.
How to support Ukraine over the long winter was a main topic of discussion at the conference, which brought defense ministers and military leaders from 50 countries together to discuss next steps in the war effort. On Tuesday, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace flew to Washington on an unannounced, one-day trip to huddle with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and White House staff, and a senior U.K. defense official said the coming winter fight was on the agenda.
Even with the remarkable gains made by Ukrainian troops since August, in which they recaptured vast swaths of the east and south, there is little sense among allies that the fighting is anywhere near its conclusion.
Instead, many NATO officials see the campaign entering a slower but no less bloody phase, as entrenched forces launch artillery, rocket and drone attacks to unseat and unnerve the other. Meanwhile Kyiv will scramble to keep the power — and the heat — pumping amid Russian missile barrages clearly meant to terrorize the civilian population.
Winter fighting can be exceptionally difficult, but holding frozen ground for days or weeks on end can also sap the will of a fighting force — particularly an occupying army — another NATO official in Brussels told reporters. “If you’re fighting in those conditions, if your tank is always getting stuck, if it is always throwing a track and you’re constantly cold and wet, it affects what we would call the moral component of an army,” the official said.
Ukrainian troops will struggle under the same conditions, but they have the motivation of fighting for their own homes, as well as a reliable pipeline of new equipment being supplied by Western partners. Several NATO countries have started rushing winter equipment to Ukraine already. This month, Canada announced $15 million worth of winter clothing donations, including 500,000 parkas, pants, boots and gloves pulled from military stocks as well as purchased from Canadian companies.
Estonia also provided two brigades worth of winter clothing. The country’s defense minister, Hanno Pevkur, said in an interview on the sidelines of the meeting that his pitch to allies was that “each country of NATO provide just one or two brigades” worth of winter gear and Ukraine would be assured enough warm clothing to get through the months of freezing weather.
“I think everybody expects that winter will impact the level of activity,” the U.K.’s defense chief, Adm. Sir Tony Radakin, told reporters on a visit to Washington this month. “But I think we’ve got to be cautious overplaying that because this is not grand maneuver warfare. Much of it is skirmishes, artillery battles and seeking opportunities that you then build on.”
The mud and frozen ground will constrain both sides, he said, adding that the fighting won’t be done by massive formations maneuvering quickly, but through a grinding conflict using artillery and drones to try to push frontlines forward or hold ground, yard by yard.
But now the word coming from NATO capitals is that they are all in on helping Kyiv endure the coming months of freezing weather and slogging progress. And top Western officials say they believe Ukraine will keep pushing forward.
“I expect that Ukraine will continue to do everything it can throughout the winter to regain its territory and to be effective on the battlefield,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in Brussels. “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that they have what’s required to be effective.”
Likewise, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said that in the coming weeks and months, “our task is to enable them to also be able to conduct meaningful operations throughout the winter and continue to supply them with everything from fuel, winter clothing, tents to advanced weapons systems.”
?MOST READ
Conversely, Russian forces continue to fall back, and even began evacuating up to 60,000 civilians to the eastern bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Wednesday, a move that may be part of a larger Russian military retreat from the key city and the surrounding region. Vladimir Putin also declared martial law in the four Ukrainian districts he recently claimed to annex, a move that may allow for forced conscription there in the dwindling areas Russia still controls.
The Russian pullback comes as Iranian-made drones pound civilian targets and infrastructure, a civilian terror campaign that has already damaged about 30 percent of the nation’s power-generating capabilities, according to Kyiv.
The new Russian campaign is in keeping with its tactic of brutalizing the civilian population as its troops continue to suffer defeats on the battlefield, and is being orchestrated by Putin’s new commander, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, whose nickname of “General Armageddon” was earned in the brutal, civilian-focused air campaign in Syria. The general made a rare appearance on Russian television Tuesday evening, in which he acknowledged the Russian position around Kherson is “very difficult.”
While the West appears to be focused, Russia continues to experience “significant” logistical and sustainment challenges, and those are only going to get harder as winter sets in, said Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder.
“Time is certainly of the essence when it comes to capitalizing on that from an operational standpoint,” he told reporters Tuesday. But Ryder acknowledged that the winter months will be difficult for the Ukrainian side as well.
“When you look at things like, you know, rain, snow, mud, the impact that it has on the terrain,” Ryder said, “it definitely will add another level of complexity to an already very-dynamic battlefield.”
Those problems might be borne more heavily by the often lightly-equipped Russian troops who are being forced to rely on supply lines the Ukrainians are intent on disrupting or cutting, and who will have to burrow into hastily dug trenches and fortifications amid a hostile populace.
The chaotic callup of 300,000 Russian reservists, who have flooded social media with videos of conscripts sleeping in muddy fields and warming themselves over makeshift fires while still at collection centers inside Russia, gives a glimpse of how poorly-equipped many Russian units are, and what challenges might await.
Getting proper winter clothing for front-line troops and the tens of thousands of callups expected to flow into Ukraine in the coming weeks will be a massive challenge for Moscow, which has struggled mightily to keep troops supplied since the start of the war.
As Kherson empties out and barely trained and lightly equipped Russian conscripts begin to flow into Ukraine, the war will take a new shape. “I would say Ukrainians are better equipped for it, and they certainly have the motivation to cope with it,” the Western official said.
Lara Seligman and Cristina Gallardo contributed to this report
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Whereas
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Ukraine Situation Report: Russia Rigged Kherson Dam To Explode Zelensky Claims
Blowing up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam on the Dnipro River would create a “large-scale disaster” said Ukraine’s president.
BY
|
PUBLISHED?OCT 20, 2022 7:47 PM
Russia has mined the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant on the Dnipro River in Ukraine’s southern Kherson Oblast, setting the stage for a "large-scale disaster," President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday.
"We have information that Russians mined the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant," Zelensky said in an Oct. 20 address to the European Council,?the?Kyiv Independent?reported.
Zelensky's statement coincides with a previous assessment by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) that Russian forces are "setting information conditions to conduct a false-flag attack on the" plant. "The Russian military may believe that breaching the dam could cover their retreat from the right bank of the Dnipro River and prevent or delay Ukrainian advances across the river."
The dam "holds about 18 million cubic meters of water," the?Kyiv Independent?reported. "If destroyed, over 80 settlements, including the regional capital Kherson, will be flooded, Zelensky said. The president added that an international observation mission is needed, as "hundreds of thousands of people may be affected."
On his Telegram channel, Zelensky on Thursday said any Russian move to blow up the dam would signal their inability to hold territory in southern Ukraine.
“Now everyone in the world must act powerfully and quickly to prevent another Russian terrorist attack,” Zelensky said on his Telegram channel. “Undermining the dam would mean a large-scale disaster. With this act of terrorism, they can destroy, among other things, even the possibility of supplying water from the Dnipro to Crimea. In the event of the destruction of the Kakhovskaya HPP dam, the North Crimean Canal will simply disappear.”
“If Russia is preparing such a terrorist attack, if it is seriously considering such a scenario, it means that the terrorists are very clearly aware that they cannot hold not only Kherson, but also the entire south of our country, including Crimea.“
The roadway on top of the dam has been?previously attacked by Ukraine?in an attempt to interfere with Russian logistics in Kherson.
But blowing up the dam is something else entirely. Zelensky compared any Russian attempt to do so with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear weapons threats.
“We must now all together - all Europeans, all world leaders, all international organizations - make it clear to the terrorist state that such a terrorist attack on the Kakhovskaya HPP would mean exactly the same as the use of weapons of mass destruction. The consequences for Russia should be appropriate. The world must react - preventively. This is key now. The principle of preventive response to security threats should finally become one of the basic principles of international politics.”
Russia faces a big decision on what to do in Kherson City, where it just finished a pontoon bridge to replace one previously destroyed by Ukraine, something we covered in detail?here.
The British Ministry of Defense, in its latest assessment, says Russia faces "a key challenge...extracting troops and their equipment across the 1000m wide river in good order."
And if Russia does decide to defend Kherson City, it may only do so with mobilized reservists, Ukraine's General Staff says, according to the?Kyiv Independent.
Before we head into more from a busy day in Ukraine,?The War Zone?readers can get caught up on our previous rolling coverage?here.
The Latest
Though a "small number" of Iranian drone technicians and trainers are on the ground in Crimea, it is the Russian troops there who “have been piloting Iranian UAVs, using them to conduct strikes across Ukraine, including strikes against Kyiv,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Thursday.
The Iranian trainers were in Crimea to help the Russians learn to operate Iranian drones, systems they were not familiar with. There were some initial operating and system failures, Kirby said.
Iranian drones, especially the?Shahed-136, have been increasingly used by Russia in a wave of attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets in retaliation for?an attack on the Kerch Bridge. The Pentagon on Thursday concurred with Kirby's assessment and said it was another example of Iran spreading terror around the world.
"We continue to see Iran be complicit in terms of exporting terror, not only in the Middle East region, but now also to Ukraine," Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon's top spokesman, told reporters Thursday. "In many ways, these drones are used as psychological weapons to create fear, but from a strategic standpoint, it still doesn't change the fact that Russian forces on the ground continue to lose territory or?at best hold ground."
In recent days,?Iranian officials have admitted?they will sell Russia more drones, as well as ‘hundreds” of short-range ballistic missiles.
Despite Iranian denials, the Pentagon has previously said that so far, Iran has provided Russia with hundreds of drones. "We wouldn't be surprised" if they continue to do so, Ryder said Thursday.
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Whereas\
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Bombing to Lose
Why Airpower Cannot Salvage Russia’s Doomed War in Ukraine
October 20, 2022
Beginning in early October, facing huge territorial loses and other reversals in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin reached for a military strategy in which Russia should have a decisive advantage: airpower. In the most widespread such campaign to date, he ordered a blistering series of missile attacks against a dozen cities and electrical infrastructure across the country. Ukrainians were forced into basements and bomb shelters, and some 30 percent of the country’s power generation capacity was knocked out, causing rolling blackouts that affected homes, hospitals, and even the basic functioning of the economy. In the weeks since, Russia has been sending waves of drones to attack residential buildings and offices in Kyiv and other cities. In effect, Putin was reminding the Ukrainian government of his ability to attack its main population centers—a threat that Ukraine, having scrapped Soviet-era bombers long ago, having no long-range rockets able to hit Russian cities, and having only a tiny number of ground attack aircraft—is unable to match. The goal, it seems, is to punish civilians, wearing them down in the hope of convincing their leaders to sue for peace.
But it is a strategy doomed to failure. As in earlier phases of the?war, Russia’s supposed air superiority has done little to shift the overall momentum on the ground. Despite the significant damage they have caused, Putin’s airstrikes have failed to hinder Ukrainian advances in the east. And when they have reached civilian targets they have only served to strengthen Ukrainian resolve.
In fact, the paradoxical outcome of Russia’s bombing campaigns suggests a more important insight about airpower in contemporary warfare. For decades, bombing civilian areas—as ugly and immoral as it gets in war—has been one of the most common strategies that states have used to undermine the target population’s morale and induce the target government to surrender. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and especially his recent?escalation, has been no different. But as dozens of conflicts over the past century have demonstrated, using airpower against civilian targets is almost always doomed to failure. And as target countries like Ukraine obtain more advanced land-based munitions, the flaws of the airpower strategy have only become more apparent.
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THE MYTH OF SHATTERED MORALE
Modern states have often sought to punish the civilian populations of their adversaries. Generally, they have done so as a cheap and easy way to compel enemy governments to make concessions, retreat, or even surrender outright. The most common air strategy is attacking civilians, either directly, by bombing residential areas, or indirectly, by damaging the economic infrastructure necessary for the distribution of food, the heating of homes, and the electrical powering of the civilian economy.
The idea got its start in World War I, when German leaders, desperate to knock the United Kingdom out of the war, launched waves of zeppelins—huge maneuverable balloons loaded with bombs—to attack London and other British cities. Later they added Gotha aerial bombers, killing many hundreds but producing no results, until finally calling off the punishment campaign in 1917. Other strategic-bombing advocates, like Italian General Giulio Douhet, wrote highly influential books claiming that huge air attacks on the enemy’s cities would cause civilians to rise up and demand that their government surrender, thus producing victory without the need for messy ground battles. Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States rapidly expanded their air forces in the 1920s and 1930s, all basing their doctrines on the premise that direct or indirect attacks on civilians would be the key to winning modern wars.
These “get tough” strategies by governments have often been welcomed by their own publics, because they can produce dramatic immediate tactical results at little military cost to one’s own side and extract what is perceived as a measure of revenge for actions of the rival. Occasionally, strategic airpower has had notable results on the battlefield, as when the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force suppressed tribal rebellions in Iraq in the 1920s and when German planes helped General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist army capture territory in the Spanish Civil War. Often overlooked in these cases, however, was that changes of the military balance on the ground, rather than punishment of civilians, played the decisive role.
A bombed population has never revolted against its own government.
As many other conflicts have shown, the gains of punishment strategies tend to be short-lived. Consider what happened when German bombers blasted London and other British cities in 1940–41, killing more than 50,000 people. Much like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky today, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to hide in bomb shelters and would walk through the rubble, leading through demonstrative action and rallying the whole of society to make the sacrifices necessary for ultimate victory. Instead of shattering morale, the Blitz motivated the British to launch—with their American and Soviet allies—the counterattack that ultimately conquered Nazi Germany.
Indeed, inflicting punishment on civilian areas is not only immoral but has been shown to be singularly unproductive as a strategy for putting pressure on an adversary. Whether punishment is meted out massively or lightly, quickly or slowly, whether it is combined with diplomatic proposals or not, the historical record shows that harming civilians is also unlikely to compel rival states to surrender or to cut deals that effectively abandon territory that are important to the viability of the state or national identity.
Nor is there any case in which a bombing campaign has caused the targeted population to revolt against their own government. For example, in several major wars in the second half of the twentieth century, Washington sought to foment popular uprisings against enemy regimes by attacking civilian infrastructure. Thus, during the Korean War, the United States destroyed 90 percent of power generation in North Korea; in the Vietnam War, it knocked out nearly as much power in North Vietnam; and in the Gulf War, American air attacks disrupted 90 percent of power generation in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But in none of these cases did the population rise up. Strikingly, the United States did not bother attacking Iraq’s electric power grid or civilians during its 2003 invasion. Concentrating instead on effective military strategy, it was able to easily defeat Iraq’s army and topple the Saddam dictatorship in six weeks.
In?World War II, of course, the effects of Allied bombardment of Germany and Japan were much more extreme. Cities were firebombed and destroyed by U.S. and British forces; more than 300,000 German civilians and 700,000 Japanese civilians were killed by conventional munitions—and more than 20 percent of each country’s population was made homeless. Yet even then, there was no public pressure on either regime to surrender. If modern nation-states in fights for the control of their homeland can withstand that, there is little reason to think that Russia’s relatively less punishing bombardment of civilians in Ukraine will cause Ukrainians or their leaders to give in.
HAMMER REQUIRES ANVIL
By contrast, airpower has proved effective when used to achieve military objectives rather than to punish civilians. In war after war, theater airpower—smashing enemy ground forces and weakening them to the point where one’s own ground forces can dominate a zone of conflict—can provide a powerful tool of coercion when combined with effective land power. In 1972, the United States compelled North Vietnam to cease conventional aggression by coordinating its massive Linebacker bombing campaign with South Vietnamese army forces. In 1991, the United States successfully compelled Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait by combining the first modern precision air campaign with a coalition of ground forces. And the absence of theater airpower can seal the fate of a friendly army, as the United States discovered when Congress blocked the use of U.S. airpower in Vietnam in 1974 and Saigon fell the following year. The lesson was repeated in Afghanistan, with the U.S. withdrawal of theater airpower before the collapse of the Afghan army in the summer of 2021.
The combined use of theater airpower and friendly ground forces has a clear logic. Once wars begin in earnest, achieving victory becomes paramount. In war, successful leaders soon discover—sometimes after exhausting cheaper but less effective strategies—that the key to successful coercion is denial. That is, successful leaders come to realize that there is no realistic option other than directly thwarting the enemy’s ability to take or hold territory. In other words, the coercing state succeeds to the extent that it can prevent its opponent from achieving its military objectives.
In actual warfare, denial works best via a “hammer and anvil” strategy, in which the combined force of airpower and ground power puts the enemy in a military Catch-22: if the enemy concentrates its ground forces in large numbers to form thick and overlapping fields of fire, in order to best withstand a ground assault, those forces will become vulnerable from the air, and the airpower hammer can smash them to bits. But if the enemy disperses its ground forces across a wide area to make effective airstrikes more difficult, it risks leaving them thinly scattered and exposed to easy defeat on the ground, allowing friendly ground forces to overwhelm isolated enemy units, easily break through weak enemy lines, and encircle vast portions of the enemy forces.
From its own previous wars,?Russia?should have understood the need for combining air and ground power. Consider its supposed successes in punishing civilians in Chechnya during the 1990s or in Aleppo during the Syrian civil war. Although it is true that Russian military forces extracted a heavy price from civilian populations in both cases, what ultimately mattered was the balance of forces on the ground. In Chechnya, Russia blasted civilians in Grozny in 1994 but its ground forces were soon defeated by the rebels, and the Russian military successfully conquered the republic by invading with a much larger ground army in 1999. In Aleppo, it was the forces of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and of Hezbollah that ultimately made the difference, taking rapid control of areas bombed by Russia. Take away these well-equipped ground forces and Russia’s air campaigns would almost certainly have failed.
FROM THE GROUND UP
Much has been made in recent years of advances in precision weaponry, ostensibly strengthening the hand of airpower. Yet?today’s precision weapons have not proved any more effective in coercing enemies by destroying political and economic targets in civilian areas, since it has long been possible to destroy such targets with large numbers of “dumb” bombs. Nor have precision weapons made strategies targeting the enemy’s leadership any more effective. Such efforts have failed repeatedly against a variety of enemies, including against Muammar al-Qaddafi in 1986; Saddam Hussein in 1991, 1998, and 2003 (he was finally captured by ground forces); and Hezbollah leaders in 2006.
Moreover, nothing motivates an enemy’s civilian base more than killing its leader. In April 1996, Russia used air-to-ground missiles to assassinate the Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, only to see a new, more energetic leader take over, kick Russia’s ground forces out of the republic, and win control when Russia invaded with massive ground forces three years later. There are exceptions to this pattern, but they only prove the rule: aerial targeting of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan from 2001 to 2010 succeeded in weakening the group, precisely because it had so little indigenous support in Pakistan.
A HIMARS missile battery has the combat power of several F-16s.
The true innovation of precision airpower has been to enhance the value of the hammer-and-anvil strategy.?Today’s precision weapons allow airpower to destroy massed enemy ground troops more easily and to attack other smaller but still essential battlefield targets. Until the advent of these weapons, airpower could rarely destroy tanks, trucks, command posts, or bridges used to supply fielded forces, even with thousands of bombs aimed at these tiny targets. Now, satellites, advanced sensors, and various manned and unmanned bombing platforms can reliably?locate?concentrated enemy forces for precision strikes to destroy.
Nowhere has this precision revolution been more evident than in Ukraine’s military forces.?Even before the arrival of advanced precision weapons from the West in the early summer, Ukrainian forces had been greatly strengthened by the fighting resolve that Russia’s failed invasion?strategy?had provoked. Since then,?Ukrainian forces have been able to use hammer-and-anvil tactics splendidly to Kyiv’s advantage—not only in defending against Russia’s initial incursion but also in rolling back Russian forces, even in areas of the east that were far better defended. These tactics have been especially effective against Russia’s most dug-in, best defensively fortified ground forces in eastern zones of the country. Ukraine’s triumphs in these situations have been made possible not by tactical airpower but by advanced ground-based weaponry, such as the HIMARS missile system. It is not a stretch to consider each HIMARS missile battery—the United States has provided Ukraine with 16 of them, with another 18 on the way—as having the air-to-ground combat power and effectiveness of several F-16 aircraft. With the flexibility and range to coordinate with Ukrainian ground forces, they can be used against Russian forces in a given area wherever they may be.
Just as important, Russia has made clear through its battlefield performance that it has hardly begun to move into the precision age. The world has witnessed how poorly a?great power with a huge but still largely “dumb bomb” military may?fare?against a much smaller state with access to precision-age weapons.?The Russian military has been losing territory steadily for many months—in March, April, and May near Kyiv and the border with Belarus, and since the early summer in the territories it had newly seized in the east. There is no obvious reason to think that the Russian military’s pre–February 2022 positions in the east and Crimea are not ultimately vulnerable as well.
LOSING UKRAINE, OR LOSING RUSSIA?
Given the failure of?Putin’s?campaign of civilian punishment and the growing effectiveness of Ukraine’s HIMARS-assisted ground offensive, many commentators have begun to ask how the war might end.?History shows that when an opponent is persuaded that specific territorial objectives cannot be achieved, it is likely to concede that territory, either tacitly or formally, rather than suffer further pointless losses. But this form of coercion—getting an opponent to recognize that prolonging a war is futile—is rarely cheap or easy. Even successful coercion usually takes nearly as long and costs nearly as much as fighting a war to a finish.?This lesson applies readily to the war in Ukraine today.
In view of current military realities, those who are calling for the United States and its allies to persuade?Ukraine?to accept a deal in the east are effectively asking the West to bail out Russia. This is unrealistic for two reasons. First, Ukraine will not and should not agree. Its forces have the momentum and have every reason to expect more territorial gains, and it would be foolish to force them to abandon a winning hand. Second, Russia might accept a deal in the near term but could easily violate it months or years from now. In short, any deal in eastern Ukraine is unlikely to be credible unless it can be backed up by powerful reinforcing mechanisms. These mechanisms would need to include agreements to respect international borders with the presence of third-party oversight, as well as military forces, and would likely be necessary to stabilize any end to the war, negotiated or not.
In the meantime, the United States and NATO are right to reinforce support and provide additional air defenses for Ukraine. These steps can mitigate some of the harm to civilians of Russia’s attacks and demonstrate that attacking urban centers only hardens the resolve of the West and Ukraine. Ultimately, however, an end to the war while the current regime remains in power in Russia would likely require the establishment of a hard militarized border, in order to keep Russia away from potential conquests in Ukraine and other parts of eastern Europe. As with the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, such a fortified boundary would serve the crucial purpose of preventing advances in both directions. It would also serve to deter any conventional offensive by either side, by denying both Russia and the West the prospect of rapid territorial incursions.
By going nuclear, Putin would be committing suicide for fear of death.
But as Putin has made clear with his escalating nuclear rhetoric, the conflict potentially involves more than conventional?weapons. Many in the West, up to and including the Biden administration, have appropriately raised the alarm about the growing threat of nuclear conflict. But Putin’s military advisers have likely explained to him that going nuclear will do little to change his losing game in Ukraine. Any use of a battlefield nuclear weapon would almost surely cause nuclear fallout to blow back over Russian military forces themselves, as well as over the civilians in Ukraine who support Russia. It would almost surely accelerate the collapse of Russia’s military positions in Ukraine and weaken Russia’s ability to defend its own territory from possible escalation. Put simply, Putin may now risk losing Russia’s positions in eastern Ukraine, but by going nuclear he could risk losing large parts of Russia itself. To paraphrase the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, this would be committing suicide for fear of death.
Indeed, no matter how lethal its bombs against civilians, Russia cannot reverse its strategic failures in Ukraine, which are already playing out. Once Putin lost the gamble that Russia’s military had the wherewithal to defeat and occupy all of Ukraine in the February–March blitzkrieg campaign, and once Ukraine and the West responded by mobilizing a powerful counterbalancing coalition to defend the country, Russia’s options narrowed almost immediately. Since April, many in the West—and Putin and others in Russia—have simply been watching the inevitable aftermath of the initial set of miscalculations that led to that massive failure.
Putin can punish Ukrainians, as his air campaign has shown. But lacking an effective hammer-and-anvil strategy of his own, he is only losing faster. The only question is whether he will accept a new iron curtain separating Russia from Europe or continue fighting pointlessly to the finish and risk losing parts of Russia.
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Andrew Beckwith, PhD