The Ukraine War, Lessons Learned

I year into the invasion of Ukraine by Russia there are some glaring lessons for us to learn as a country moving forward. SOFREP’s editorial position ought to be clear to our members and the general audience right now, Russia is the aggressor and invaded Ukraine with the goal of erasing its culture. language, religion, and its very existence from the map.  Ukraine is and wishes to remain a sovereign country and has every right to resist being annihilated and enslaved by Putin and Russia.

That said, here are SOFREP’s top takeaways from the war in Ukraine so far.

There Was a Massive Failure of our Intelligence Agencies and the Pentagon.

This war began in part because of a massive failure by our intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, both of which grossly overestimated the capabilities of the Russian army while dismissing the capabilities of the Ukrainian army. If you will recall the news headlines at the beginning of the war, military experts all seemed to agree that Russia would overrun Ukraine in a few days and its fate was sealed.  Rather than send weapons and aid to Ukraine immediately, the Biden administration offered to evacuate Ukrainian president Zelensky out of the country with his family.  Zelensky famously refused and vowed to fight on, pleading with the world to come to the aid of his country.

Not quite believing Ukraine stood a chance, the US and NATO began to trickle weapons and aid to Zelenksy as a way of appearing to help without really helping much, hedging the bet that Kyiv would still fall in days.  Then two things happened that changed things on the ground.  First, the Russians underestimated the ability and resolve of Ukraine to resist invasion and they attacked in the dead of winter with too few troops in undermanned units that we assess were at 40% fighting effectiveness.  The Russians also did not prepare their army for war mentally or logistically. They did not inform their troops as to what was about to occur and this had disastrous consequences for their armored formations.  The Russian army is notoriously corrupt on all levels, so the troops on “training exercises” in Belarus showed up with faulty equipment that was not in good working order, expired rations, short on ammunition, and had even sold off the fuel in their vehicles to buy vodka from the locals.  The order to invade Ukraine came as quite a surprise to them as well.   When they received orders to move into Ukraine, they went with what they had on hand, vehicles half full of fuel, armored personnel carriers(APCs) that had a commander, gunner, and driver, but no infantry riding in the troop compartment, and no air support.  It didn’t take long for the offensive to stall simply because they ran out of gas and the Ukrainians began a mass slaughter of the cream of Russia’s experienced career soldiers and technical personnel trapped in long columns of tanks, APCs and trucks that were out of gas.

How we got it all so wrong regarding the militaries of both countries we may never know, but we really should have known, this is why we maintain a huge military and multiple intelligence agencies, to assess these things accurately.  The failure regarding Ukraine’s abilities is especially galling.  Following the initial invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2014, the US spent the next 8 years sending US units over to Ukraine to train their army, air force, navy, and Special Forces units.  The CIA and DIA were also over there working with their counterparts in Ukraine. They all seriously underestimated the will to fight, resourcefulness, and capabilities of Ukraine’s armed forces.

Conventional Wars Are Not Over

For decades we have been told that nuclear weapons made large-scale conventional wars a thing of the past because they will end up triggering a nuclear war between the superpowers.  These prognosticators tended to ignore the numerous conventional conflicts that broke out involving the nuclear powers directly or indirectly like the Korean War, Vietnam, the war in Kosovo, and the two Gulf Wars which were largely conventional conflicts. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is actually a regression of the conventional conflict.  Anti-tank missiles and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles have blunted the mobility advantages of these weapons systems to the extent that the battlefield in Ukraine resembles one from WWI, with extensive trenches and fixed fortifications, millions of mines being laid and infantry doing most of the fighting and dying trying to take the next village, town or terrain feature advancing under artillery barrages and blistering machine gun fire.

Our Weapons, Even The Older Ones Are Really Good

In the initial weeks and months of the war, two US-made weapons systems given to Ukraine were early stars of the conflict.  I am talking about the FGM-148 Javelin, Advanced Anti-tank Weapon System Medium Missile(AAWS-M), and the FIM-92 Stinger anti-aircraft missile. Both of these systems were introduced in the 1980s and are considered obsolete by our own military.  They are over 40 years old at this point.  We had several thousand of both types in storage and started doling them out to Ukraine.  They may have cost US taxpayers millions when they were purchased but they were relegated to being expended as training munitions until they no longer were safe to use and then they would be destroyed.  US weapons manufacturers should reopen the line to begin production again on these systems for our allies as they are more than a match for anything Russia and probably China are making right now.

Russia is not a Peer Adversary.

Clearly, Russia is not a peer adversary for the US  It may not have been one for quite some time too.  The Ukraine war has also established that Russia has ‘clay feet’.  By this, I mean that it puts on a show of producing advanced weapons but is unable to produce them in quantity or even sustain the ones they have in its inventory.  At the beginning of the war, we saw T-90 tanks getting destroyed only to see them replaced with older T-80s, and then T-72s, and now even T-62s which are older than the Javelins that are blowing their turrets halfway to the Moon.  This demonstrates that Russia is unable to replace its losses and is unable to fight a sustained conflict for more than a few months.  We have also seen pictures of Tank Dumps full of broken tanks, APCs, and vehicles that the Russians were unable to repair for a lack of parts or technical personnel.  To be honest, we think some were intentionally disabled by their own crews to escape the meat grinder.  Everywhere we look we see Russian weapons destroyed and replaced with mothballed equipment taken out of storage.  Even things like boots and socks are now comprised of retrograde replacements because the Russian economy can’t even produce an adequate supply of socks.

We should not expect that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is in better shape.  If you want a nuclear missile to launch from its silo and reach its target you have to take very special care of it.  It has to be stored in carefully monitored climate-controlled conditions.  They require constant checks, maintenance, and upgrades to their guidance, warhead, and propulsion systems.  You even have to hire exterminators to make sure rodents don’t get inside them and gnaw on the wiring. Here in the US, close to 90% of what we have spent on our nuclear arsenal has just been for upkeep.

Given what we have seen of the rest of the Russian military in that last year, should we expect that they took care of their nukes?

Or are half of them non-functioning and sitting dead in their launch vehicles and silos?  Russia would have a very hard time getting these back in working order, it you let things go for too long all you can do is scrap them and start over because you have to be 100% sure they will launch and reach their targets. The reason for this is simple.  If your missile fizzles on launch you are still going to trigger an immediate nuclear retaliation by the US, the UK, and France anyway.

Every few months, Putin will drop a suggestion that they might use nuclear weapons to win the conflict or attack Western Europe and the US. We should take these threats seriously and demonstrate in a meaningful way in public that our nuclear arsenal is up to date and capable of launching and reaching its targets.

Our Foreign Policy With Russia Has Proven To Be a Complete Failure

For decades since the end of the Soviet Union, the United States has sought good trade relations with Russia while ignoring Russia’s foreign policy as if the two can be separated.  Europe tried to do this as well, treating trade policy as if it was different and separated from foreign policy.  The history of armed conflict has shown that just about every war happens because one side believes they have something to gain economically by attacking somebody else. In Ukraine, we see this as well.  Russia wants Ukraine’s wheat, oil, gas and ports with access to the Black Sea as a way of increasing its own economic output.  The Kremlin would like to go even further and restore the Eastern Bloc status quo that existed during the Cold War which gave Moscow captive trading partners they could dictate terms to in their own favor.

We are making this same mistake with China, essentially fueling the expansion of their military with a $100 billion dollar trade deficit every year.  That deficit means China is extracting $100 billion in wealth from US consumers and putting it into their own economy.  When China launches its next aircraft carrier, just remind yourself that you helped pay for it with goods made in China.

It’s time for the US State Department and the White House to tie trade policy into our foreign policy when it comes to other nations like Russia(and especially China)  We are the most powerful economy in the world with the wealthiest consumer market on the planet.  We can impose conditions on access to that market and also our currency since the US Dollar is still the world’s preferred currency for trade. Trade is also a weapon that can be used to deter aggression by keeping aggressor nations poor.  We need to be as advanced in our foreign trade policy as we are in our weapons.

The UN is Useless in Preventing Wars.

The other day the UN passed a resolution regarding a “just peace” in Ukraine which called for Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukrainian territory.  The resolution was drafted by Ukraine and its allies and passed with a vote of 141 in favor, 7 opposed and 32 abstentions.  As the resolution was non-binding on member states it will be ignored as anything but an empty gesture by a failed body. It might as well have been a resolution passed by my condo association for all its worth.

The vote also signals what a failure the UN is when it comes to preventing wars or ending them, which is what it was chartered to do.  The UN has had a year to isolate Russia diplomatically but in a vote on a worthless,  non-binding resolution there were still 7 no votes and 32 states which refused to vote either way.

Russia is still seated as a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto powers. Here’s the thing. Russia isn’t even a legal member of the UN since 1991 and the dissolution of the USSR.  It never signed the 1945 charter agreement and it has never even been voted admittance by the UN’s General Assembly.  The countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union, like Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine had to be voted in when they became independent countries but not the Russian Federation.

The US should join with other nations to have Russia expelled from the UN entirely.

Isolationism is Alive and Well in the United States

It was George Washington in his farewell address to the nation that cautioned America about avoiding foreign entanglements in Europe.  Washington wanted his small and struggling country to avoid any formal alliances with countries that would bring them into conflict with other nations and instead make short-term alliances only in emergencies, reasoning,

“Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?”

At the time Washington certainly made a fair point.  His farewell address also created within the country a movement toward Isolationism in which the US would just go it alone and stay out of any foreign conflicts wherever they might occur. Not that we were able to do that. In 1798 we were in a Quasi-War with France. In 1805 and again in 1815, we fought two wars with the Barbary Corsairs over free trade in the Mediterranean.  In 1812, we were at war with England and Canada in our second War of Independence.

Even in the 1940s the American First movement(Trump did not invent the term) sought to keep America out of yet another war in Europe between the usual suspects of Brittain France and Germany.

Today that isolationist attitude is expressed again as opposition to giving aid to Ukraine.  Those holding such views are not unpatriotic or pro-Russian just for expressing their desire to see the US stay out of the latest European war, but they do miss the point.

Yes, we are spending vast sums of money on this conflict.

Yes, some of it will be wasted, stolen or lost.

Yes, it could all come to nothing if Ukraine loses.

Yes, Ukraine is a notoriously corrupt country(Are there any that are spotlessly uncorrupted? Even us?).

I concede all of these points, but we really aren’t involved in Ukraine, just for Ukraine.  Russia has made no secret that it wants to restore the vassal states that it controlled as the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War.  The fall of Ukraine means the eventual fall of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Moldovia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania, Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia.

That is Russia controlling two-thirds of Europe with another 150 million people under their rule. Most likely that will trigger a much larger war in Europe.  None of that is good for America in terms of our national security, trade, and our supposed support of democracy around the world.  It would also trigger a gigantic refugee crisis unseen since WWII in terms of displaced persons.

The US no longer the country that Washington cautioned about making foreign alliances.  In his time, the US was just 13 states with a population of 2.5 million souls.  We were in most respects what we would now call a third-world country in terms of our economy, literacy, income, and trade. We had no standing army or navy.

Now we are the sole global superpower on Earth. For the first time in world history, English is the international language of science, diplomacy and finance. As late as WWII, it was split up between German, French and English respectively.  Washington was right in his time, but the modern isolationists inspired by him are wrong in our time.  We live in a world globally connected by communications and trade. If the United States does not dominate in trade, science, finance, diplomacy, and military might, a country like China or Russia will surely fill the vacuum left by us.

NATO is a Mess

This war has exposed some major weaknesses in our NATO Alliance partners.  Germany in particular is so close to Russia while being a part of an alliance meant to check Russian aggression that it isn’t sure what side it is on.  It has promised weapons to Ukraine to garner headlines only to renege on the agreement days or weeks later after intense pressure from the Kremlin is brought to bear on Berlin.  Other NATO countries have proven to have clay feet like Russia, with insufficient stockpiles of arms and munitions to assist Ukraine without dangerously compromising their own security.  As usual, it is left to the US to provide an overwhelming amount of military aid by a factor of at least five.

Ukraine’s membership in NATO is now in the works.  Ukraine will need to maintain a huge army in the future if it wants to continue to survive as a nation after the Russian invasion is repelled and it reclaims its lost territory.  This will mean NATO bases with NATO troops and planes deployed to them.  It can’t just be the US doing that. One of the lessons of this war is that out NATO partners need to modernize and stock their arsenals not just for their own defense but to meet their obligations to the treaty itself. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia justified its existence as an organization, but it can’t exist as an umbrella made in the USA and held by us for our NATO partners to stand under if it rains on them.  They need to actually be partners and carry their weight.

Ukraine can win this thing

Ukraine has proven that it can win this fight when virtually the entire world assumed their extinction was assured in a matter of days.  They have fought with incredible bravery and resolve in the face of very serious losses in the field.  Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan were billions poured into weapons and training went up in smoke with troops who could care less about defending their country in large part, Ukrainians are willing to fight desperately to preserve their democracy no matter how flawed or imperfect.  If the United States truly supports democracy around the world, if these are not just empty words, then Ukraine deserves our best efforts as it fights off invasion and extinction as a country.