History vs Passion

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described the tanks as forming a “Fist of Freedom” that will presumably break the lines in eastern Ukraine and drive the Russians back.

However the fact that it’s taken this long to agree to send these vehicles to the country has put some time constraints on their effectiveness.

Speaking to The Economist, Commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi said he would speak to the US Chair of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, and explain his calculations.

“I need 300 tanks, 600-700 IFVs [infantry fighting vehicles], 500 Howitzers. Then, I think it is completely realistic to get to the lines of February 23rd [2022],” he said.

Milley hopes that 600 Ukrainian soldiers training at Grafenwoehr, Germany will be able to learn how to use the equipment, including the tanks “sometime before the spring rains show up, that would be ideal,” he told reporters.

The spring rains turn much of the flat steppe land of eastern Ukraine into mud which can seriously impede a tank’s movement. For now, the 3 separate tanks will be trained on before being delivered. That means that from a future point in time after they are deployed, to the time when the spring rains arrive, Ukraine has perhaps 60 days or less to utilize them in the field. A tank bogged down in mud will become an easy target for artillery and airstrikes.

The problem also lies, as former United Nations weapons inspector and Marine Corps Maj. Scott Ritter details in a long review, is that these 600 maintenance troops will also be learning to repair and maintain 5 separate artillery systems, including self-propelled and towed guns, and 4 infantry fighting vehicles.

Of particular concern, reports Ritter, will be the IFVs, including the US-made Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the UK-made Stryker, the German Marder, and the Swedish CV 90, citing several reports of complex systems failures, track replacement difficulties, transmission failures, and constant maintenance.

What does this have to do with the tanks? Zaluzhny believes he needs about twice as much armor as what he’s receiving to achieve what the US wants in Ukraine, namely to push the Russians out of all the areas they now occupy. These IFVs will be critical to the punch, but the maintenance and training burden will detract from the time the combat engineers can spend coming to grips with three, potentially 4 main battle tanks—the Leopard 2, the A1 Abrams, the Challenger 2, and potentially the Leclerc main battle tank which France is currently deciding on sending.

The Abrams for example uses a sophisticated and complex gas turbine engine that doesn’t run on diesel.

These maintenance problems and the short window of opportunity to use them in a counter-attack exist as large challenges to Zaluzhny’s plans. Instead, the tanks seem more to ensure Kyiv doesn’t fall.

Their own Afghanistan

In announcing the delivery of 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, President Biden noted they were “solely for defense,” by which he means the retaking of all Ukrainian territory including Crimea.

The last two conflicts where main battle tanks were used decisively however, the Gulf War of 1991 and the Invasion of Iraq in 2003, they were supported by massive organized air support; and while the deliberations at Ramstein on the tanks this January went on for weeks, attended by unprecedented 50 national defense ministers from around the world, there weren’t major deliberations about providing warplanes to Ukraine.

“I think a war of attrition is exactly what they want, they want to calibrate the escalation to make Russia bleed as much as they can, and that’s a matter of time; and we’ve seen it, the Russian casualties are horrendous,” says Rick Rozoff, veteran reporter and expert on NATO operations.

The post-WWII age of warfare has been one of attrition. With the rise of international condemnation of border changing through force, and the growth in the success of asymmetrical fighting, virtually no armed conflicts have resulted in anything other than a grinding stalemate, and if lucky, eventual peace. This could include the Balkans conflicts, the Korean War, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the conflict in Syria, the so-called “frozen conflicts” of South Ossetia and Ngorno-Karabakh, the intervention in Somalia, the Saudi/US War in Yemen, and the Ukraine conflict between 2014-2018.

NATO has provided half of what the Ukrainian command believes they need to win the war, likely because NATO doesn’t want them to win the war, as nothing would put the world closer to a nuclear exchange.

Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, posed six questions to which the deliveries of the tanks come without answers. Among these unanswered questions are whether the NATO guarantors would be happy seeing the tanks roll into Crimea and risk further escalation, and if not, at what point in the event of a Ukrainian counter-attack could they be convinced from stopping. If the war continues to a stalemate, Lieven continues, what does the end of the war look like with a stiffened Ukrainian army?

Also at Quincy, former Marine and Senatorial staffer on foreign relations for Rand Paul (R – KY), James Webb asks if the Pentagon or Berlin has considered contingency plans if, like the HIMAR artillery system, Russia adapts to the presence of the tanks. He also asks if NATO considered how likely it is that these flagship weapon systems like the Patriot Missile battery, the HIMAR, and the various tanks now arriving there will end up in the weapons laboratories of the Chinese.

Instead, it’s far more likely that some op-ed pieces published in the Washington Post in December of 2021, authored by foreign policy columnist David Ignatius and neoconservative hawk author Max Boot, suggest the thinking of NATO strategists.

In their pieces, Ignatius and Boot outline that supporting an insurgency would be the best way to deter Russia, with the latter urging a scenario in which “Ukrainian patriots could fight as guerrillas against Russian occupiers,” and that they should be armed and positions should be built for them in the heavily wooded Carpathian Mountains.

The former instead looks to the future, using his connections at the White House to reveal that Biden had plans in place to turn Ukraine into an insurgent battleground, such as the kind Russia (and the US for that matter) were unable to overcome in Afghanistan. Ignatius also writes that there were 150 special Pentagon operations advisers in Ukraine before the war broke out, and that “the CIA also has a paramilitary branch with experience in organizing insurgencies in Afghanistan and Syria”.

That same month, Congressman Chris Murphy (D – CT), appeared on television to say that “Ukraine can become the next Afghanistan for Russia,” on a Sunday program of Fareed Zakaria on CNN.

It’s safe to assume that if Ignatius was right, then the Biden camp is pretty happy they have an army to support rather than an insurgency, but their carefully calibrated support up until this point signifies not that they have any intention of winning the war, only that NATO has no interest of losing the war. WaL