Sending state-of-the-art US and EU defense technology to Ukraine is not an Ikea assemble-by-numbers product.  These weapons are complex and need US and EU trainers and advisors to successfully employ them on the battlefield.

So it comes as no surprise to SOFREP that US and British Special Operations are involved in an advisory capacity on the Ukrainian battlefield because Foreign Internal Defense (or FID) is one of the core tenets of the US Army Special Forces.

The complicated part comes when these advisory forces join in the fight, which is quite common as pointed out above.

What makes things more complicated over time, is that the support will likely grow as more American and allied units angle for a chance to deploy to the Ukraine battlefront as it feeds into their unit relevancy and financial budgets.

This is the politics of war and we saw the ugly result of a poorly managed troop swell and Defense blank-check spending in Afghanistan for over twenty years with poor results.

The increased presence of US and allied warfighters also plays into Putin’s internal narrative of Russia versus the US and NATO.

Putin has masterfully pushed this narrative from the very beginning and it’s taken hold and spread throughout Russia like a virus in a Chinese wet market.

SOFREP still believes that Russia will not win a ground war in Ukraine for the main reasons below:

• General lack of will to fight (Ukraine is fiercely engaged and most Russians don’t want to fight). This is made very apparent by many of the intercepted Russian cell phone calls.
• Outdated Russian Defense Tech. Russians are forced to buy newer Chinese weapons via Iran and elsewhere). Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are receiving much better weapon systems from the US, UK, and EU forces.
• A Disjointed Command & Control Structure that is severely lacking in senior and junior battlefield managers. We discuss this in-depth here.

Putin’s card up his sleeve is the use of tactical nukes.  But the strategic thinking dictator must know that any use of nuclear weapons would risk isolation from key strategic allies, mainly China.

Summary

It would be foolish to think Putin will not use the nuclear option if American diplomacy paints him into a corner with no exit.

Meanwhile, the war rages on and we are no closer to peace until strong Western leadership emerges from the 2024 Presidential election or elsewhere in Western Europe.

We see the war continuing for the remainder of 2023 and into 2024 as Putin uses a divided and distracted America as a smoke screen to further push his nationalistic agenda and legacy.