A problem of ignorance combined with a problem of incoherent thinking
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
Photo: 35th Marine Brigade, Defense Forces of Ukraine
I was hoping to avoid writing another essay on the war in Ukraine and its consequences, but the garbage issuing from the recent Munich Security Conference and the dispiriting level of what passes for commentary on it both suggest to me that, even now, the West doesn’t get it. I’m not just referring to the idea that Russia might “lose,” because after all, if you create impossible fantasy victory conditions and symbolically try to impose those on the Russians, then of course you can always claim that they have “lost.” And indeed in the last few days, the fourth anniversary of the war has been the excuse for a lot of this loose and uninformed analysis. Ultimately, of course, the inevitable “they won but at too great a cost” will be an assertion which is logically impossible to disprove, so long as you can control the definition of the words “great” and “cost”
No, what I have in mind here is a problem of ignorance combined with a problem of incoherent thinking. I’ve touched on each before, as part of my argument that the defeat of the West is as much an intellectual one as anything else. So let’s take the problem of ignorance first, distinguishing as we go between the refusal to acknowledge defeat, which is essentially political, and the incapacity to understand defeat, which is an intellectual failing. In each case, the process of thinking starts at the end, from a predetermined conclusions, and works forwards, flailing around in the search for evidence to support the imposed conclusions from which you began. Let’s take the first first.
In 2022, European governments believed that the Russians had committed a disastrous error in invading Ukraine, and celebrated this belief with champagne and canapés in the best hotel bars in Brussels. The decrepit Russian military machine, it was thought, would fall apart in weeks, possibly even days, leading to a political crisis, the eviction of Putin from power, and his replacement by a pro-western moderate or something. When that didn’t work, the expectation changed to Ukraine fighting on, with western weapons, western military advice and western sanctions against Russia. If the Russian economy had not already been terminally crippled by sanctions, then the Great Ukrainian Offensive of 2023 would finish off whatever was left in Moscow, and lead to the eviction of Putin from power, and his replacement by a pro-western moderate or something.
Now that neither of these things has happened, and evidently will not, and it is Europe and the US who are suffering politically, economically, and militarily, western capitals are simply resorting to fantasies, and are on their collective knees praying for a miracle. After all, the destruction of Ukraine, now well under way, is not even the most important issue, for all that it would be a catastrophic humiliation for the West. No, the real problem is a mobilised, well-organised and battle-hardened Russian military capability and defence industry, coupled with a political mood in Moscow that seems to run the gamut from active resentment up to the unconcealed desire for revenge. And the War itself, oh irony, has greatly speeded up the development and deployment of innovative weapons and capabilities that Russia now has, and the West does not, and may never have. Clever, that. Such a situation, of western political, economic and military weakness and inferiority, cannot be acknowledged by western leaders without their brains exploding. Therefore it will not happen. Therefore a miracle will occur to prevent it.
But even in whispered conversations in quiet corners, enlightened western dissidents don’t really get it, because they are still the victims of a strategic culture that is essentially ignorant about large-scale modern warfare in general, and the history and present of the Russian attitude to war in particular. This is an observation rather than a criticism: for the last thirty-five years, nobody of importance has been interested in those subjects, and ironically books on 20th century history are probably the easiest, if not the only, way into both questions. Moreover, a senior military leader in a western military or an ambassador to NATO would probably have been born around 1970, and been at university when the Berlin Wall came down. Our military leader has probably never commanded more than a company, or perhaps a battalion, on operations, and perhaps been a staff officer at a UN Mission HQ. Now peacekeeping, counter-terrorism, military assistance and the like are all perfectly valid military tasks, and western armies have largely been structured and trained for them for a long time now. The problem, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is the belief that another major conventional war in Europe was so unlikely that there was no point in organising and training and developing doctrine for it. Whilst it was sort-of known that Russia did not share this view, since its geography was what it always had been, the West didn’t spend much time thinking about Russia, which it regarded as a declining state with a useless military, and used what little political capital it was prepared to devote to the subject to making rude faces and supercilious remarks. Thus, the West disarmed itself intellectually, such that it could not even understand what it was seeing, much less what was happening underneath.
The way the Russians are fighting the war in Ukraine is starting to acquire a label; that of “attrition.” I say “label” because not many people seem to understand what the term means, but too many people seem to assume that it means endless head-on attacks until you finally batter your way through. (The Russians clearly don’t see it like that, though.) “Attrition” is also placed in opposition to the concept of “manoeuvre warfare” which is taken to be the superior, western, way of fighting, as taught to the Ukrainians, who should by rights therefore have won already but have unaccountably failed to do so.
It will become obvious very quickly that the two concepts are not true alternatives, still less alternatives between which you can necessarily freely choose. Attrition is a high-level strategy for fighting wars, whereas manoeuvre warfare is an operational level fashion of organising the fighting itself, depending on the nature of the conflict. It’s sensible to start by talking about attrition because it is situated at a higher conceptual level, and describes, to a large extent, the way that most if not all wars are actually fought. Now, as I say, “attrition” easily acquires the wrong connotations, and can be associated with mindless battering away irrespective of casualties. But most wars at most times since the early modern era have been wars of attrition in some sense, simply because wars require resources of all kinds if they are to be pursued, and the side that runs out of resources first will probably lose. One good historical example is that soldiers needed to be paid and fed, and that used to require actual, old-fashioned metal money. The Rulers in the wars of the eighteenth century, for example, had to resort to melting down metal plates and even church silver to coin money to pay their soldiers. Can’t pay, can’t play was the logic of the time.
In the days when armies were small and seasonal, and you could raise them if you could pay for them, sheer manpower was less of a problem. But the ability of the French Republic to raise large numbers of volunteers, the appearance of irregular fighters in Spain after the French invasion, and the increasing adoption of conscript armies as the century progressed, meant that the resources of the country (and not just those commanded by the Ruler in person, as before) became factors in success or failure in war. And mass armies required an infrastructure to register, raise, train, command and keep track of manpower, as well as the development of doctrine capable of employing such numbers effectively, not to mention depots and training areas, and a mobilisation and transport infrastructure to take them to where they might be needed at least as quickly as a likely enemy could mobilise themselves. Quite quickly, the railway became a major instrument of war, and it was said that the Prussian General Staff sent its best officers to deal with the subject.
Military technology developed quickly thereafter, and nations went to war as much with their future industrial potential, as with the equipment they already possessed. Artillery shells were produced in unthinkable numbers between 1914 and 1918, and this in turn required skilled personnel, factories and access to the raw materials needed. It also required, for the first time, intelligent priority judgements to be made about the best use of men and women, especially those with potentially useful industrial skills. Technology also advanced rapidly, and produced for the first time a requirement for specialists behind the front line in everything from transport and ammunition stocks to animal welfare and the issue of pay and rations.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, if we want to understand the current conflict in Ukraine better, we probably need to look at the First World War as an example of an attrition war, which is what historians now do. It was so in the widest sense, as the two sides sought to attrit each other’s capability to make war, not just the forces on the front line. The allies tried to strangle Germany economically, and the Germans eventually took up unrestricted U-Boat warfare. Both sides experiment with aerial bombing. Both sides manoeuvred diplomatically to bring other nations into the conflict, and so access more manpower and resources. Both sides, and especially the Central Powers, went to extreme lengths to discover and employ new sources of manpower. Both the British and the French depended heavily on the human and material resources of their Empires. Relative efficiency mattered a lot as well: the theoretical mobilisation capacity of the Russians was never really reached because of inefficient and corruption. And in the end, the Allies won primarily because they understood they were fighting a war of attrition: the Germans rather less so.
This was most obvious on the battlefield on the Western Front. After the excitement of the mobile battles of 1914, when it looked as though the war might finish quite quickly, the conflict soon settled into the apparent deadlock we are all familiar with. Simply put, it was possible for each side to maintain a continuous front from the Swiss border to the sea, thus making serious manoeuvre of any kind impossible. As the months and years passed, defences became more sophisticated and defensive tactics more deadly. It was, of course, possible to mount attacks, and to penetrate enemy lines to some degree. But the enemy’s reserves and artillery would then come in to play, and communication with your own troops was effectively impossible, so most gains were quickly reversed. Whilst offensive tactics improved dramatically during the war, with carefully scripted artillery barrages and the use of armoured vehicles, this fundamental problem was never overcome, in spite of politicians and the media howling for dramatic advances, much as they do in Ukraine today.
In the circumstances, advances and retreats were not very important in themselves, and advances could be very costly for little reward. Foch, the greatest General of the War, understood this, and began to build an attrition machine which would eventually defeat the Germans, but he was sacked before the end of the War precisely because it all didn’t seem to be happening quickly enough. Essentially, the human resources of the Allies were greater than those of the Central Powers, as was their productive capability. In the end, this would tell, and the Allies would win, provided they continued to attrit the Central Powers, especially the Germans. Even when Russia left the War in 1917, the Germans needed so many resources (by some estimates a million men) to garrison and administer the conquered territories, that their manpower problems were not much alleviated.
The mechanism for achieving this was attrition battles: artillery bombardments would kill, wound and disorient the enemy, and the subsequent fighting would inflict at least as many casualties on the defenders as the attackers. With smaller resources, the Germans would eventually crack, which they did. Thus, for all the propaganda at the time, battles such as Verdun and the Somme in 1916 were not necessarily expected to take much territory: at the Somme, German casualties were similar to those of the British, but they could less well afford them. Good planning and skilled commanders could reduce the attacker’s casualties anyway: the British disaster on the Somme was largely because the troops were only half trained (the attack had been planned for August, but was rushed through to relieve pressure on the French.) The better-trained French troops on their flank were much more successful. And the most important penetration of the latter stages of the war—the German Operation Michael in 1918—may have terrified western leaders and publics, but all it produced was a salient that went nowhere and could not be supplied or reinforced.
Frankly, if you want to understand how the Russians have been fighting in Ukraine, the best way in is by reading about the Allied offensive of 1918, in any decent history of the War on the Western Front. At that point, the Allies were pushing the Germans back step by step, but without dramatic breakthroughs. There was, however, no possibility of the Germans doing more than delaying this process, and it was obvious that ultimately they could not win. Much the same is true of the current situation in Ukraine, although the problem there, as it was for pundits and political leaders in 1918, is that it doesn’t look like a victory.
One reason for this is that we are in one of those phases where battlefield technologies seem to be favouring the defender rather than the attacker. This is self-evidently the case with drones, because an attacker has to expose himself, whereas a defender can stay hidden. This does not mean that drones are entirely a defensive weapon at the tactical level—the Russians have been advancing behind drone swarms, for example—but relatively, they favour the defender at the moment. However, it’s important to understand that, whilst that enables a “continuous” front to be held, it doesn’t, any more than it did between 1914-18, mean that the Ukrainians are lined up, shoulder to shoulder, along the line of contact. What it means rather, as it did more than a century ago, is that there are no gaps and holes in the line through which attackers can manoeuvre. In Ukraine, drones have partly taken over the tradition role of artillery in preventing such breakthroughs, and it is probably clearer to say that the Ukrainians have a continuous defensive capability, rather than a continuous front as such. This means that in the end, the Russians will have to pursue a battle of attrition, and this is what they have been doing. But because the target of a battle of attrition is not just the enemy’s army, but the enemy’s warmaking capability as a whole, they have been attacking other parts of that capability, notably communications centres and electrical supply.
The West has always found it hard to understand attrition warfare: even strategic bombing, which functioned as that in the end, was originally conceived in the 1930s as a means of delivering a single, shattering knockout blow. Thus, the West doesn’t understand what it’s seeing in Ukraine—the intellectual failure I mentioned earlier—but neither does it understand the nature of any hypothetical war with Russia, which would be fought in much the same way. Yet the West has been on the wrong end of attrition wars for generations, if you think about it. The Vietnam War was an attrition war as seen by the Communists, whereas the US saw it more as a conventional war of manoeuvre. We know who won, and why: the Communists finally attrited away the politico-military capability of the US to continue the war, after which they transitioned to a conventional campaign against the Saigon government. The long struggles in Algeria, Angola and Mozambique, and to an extent in South Africa, followed essentially the same format. The fact that western pundits don’t understand this accounts for the football-spectator type of commentary on battles in Ukraine. Look, the Russians have advanced ten kilometres here! Look, the Ukrainians have recaptured five kilometres there! Oh, the Russians have taken it back again! This kind of thing can legitimately matter when, for example a strategic town, a transport and communications axis or the further bank of a major river is taken or lost, but otherwise the real issue is, how did the results of the fighting affect the attrition war? And it never seems to cross their mind that an inconclusive battle, or even an unsuccessful attack, might be acceptable if it draws Ukrainian reserves away from more important areas.
The examples of western defeats I mentioned earlier (we can add Afghanistan and perhaps Iraq) are also important because they also bring in the dimension of time. The West wants, and expects, quick and clear victories. Its theorists draw what in my opinion is a dangerous distinction between “winning the war” and “winning the peace,” as though these were wholly independent activities. Clausewitz shakes his head irritably at this point, and reminds us that the purpose of a military campaign is always political, and that the campaign is not over until the political objectives are attained or abandoned. And if you have no idea how to attain the political objectives once the major fighting is over, well then maybe you shouldn’t have started the campaign in the first place.
The West has historically been bad at identifying and holding to long-term objectives, and sequencing actions towards them. This doesn’t mean that western countries have no long-term aspirations, which from time time may attract a new initiative or undergo a new lease of life, but step-by-step planning and execution, which of course attrition warfare requires, and which would also be required by any programme of “rearmament,” has not been a western strength. As a counter-example, the FLN took control of Algeria with a carefully-thought-out long-term strategy from which they never deviated. First, establish themselves as the sole recognised voice of the indigenous population, if necessary by crushing other political movements, including those with more consensual objectives. Then radicalise the local population through armed provocation, then resist the French for as long as it took, and finally evict the French, take complete control of the territory and proclaim the nation of Algeria. The FLN knew they could never win militarily—indeed they were defeated—but they reckoned on a war of economic and political attrition instead, which indeed they won. There’s an interesting contrast with Angola, where the Portuguese were on their way to winning an attrition war at the time of the 1974 Revolution, because the main liberation movements were at least partly consumed with fighting each other.
So even if the practical problems with “rearmament” that I have discussed before could magically be overcome, the kind of long-term focused thinking that any kind of real rearmament strategy requires has scarcely been a strength of the western political system recently. Indeed, “rearmament” itself is a curious choice of word, since it assumes that there has been a previous state of disarmament. This is actually very rare in history, and usually describes no more than obvious adjustments after major wars. The only real historical example of rearmament is that of the mid-1930s, when the British, and to a lesser extent the French, began to modernise and enlarge their military forces against the possibility of a war with Germany. However, the British example was at least as much about modernisation (notably the Army) as about increasing the size of the armed forces. The Air Force did expand, and many new air bases were built, because of the perception of a likely air threat from Germany and a decision to use the manned bomber as a principal weapon in any war. For its part, the Navy received more and newer ships. In the French case, the issue was largely force modernisation, especially with new fighter aircraft and tanks. But in neither case were the militaries greatly expanded (the French military, conscription-based, was already large) and the British military only really grew substantially in size after the War began.
So it’s not at all obvious what people mean when they talk about “rearmament”, or if they have any idea anyway. It is perfectly true, of course, that western forces are now much smaller than they were during the Cold War, because the scenario of massive conventional warfare in Europe stopped looking reasonable. I’ve explained elsewhere why recreating the conscription-based militaries of the 1980s is simply not possible today, but I’d add that in any case, exactly no thinking seems to have been done about the strategic purpose they would serve, and how they would carry it out. Indeed, and as often happens, the West has started with the answer and worked backwards, in the vague hope of finding a relevant question. So the answer is “rearmament,” even if we don’t know what that is exactly. And on inspection, it seems to mean not much more than “spending money and buying stuff, we’ll get back to you on the details.” Now in reality, lack of money is not really the problem (the UK’s defence budget, for example, is higher than it was for much of the Cold War.) Rather, the terrifying cost-growth in major equipment projects has itself produced a kind of involuntary disarmament, as inventories have reduced to reflect what can actually be afforded. So in spite of calls for “rearmament,” western forces are actually getting smaller all the time, continuing a trend which dates back at least fifty years now.
So because money is all we understand, money is going to be the answer. But then what was the question again exactly? Where is the coherent thought process you might reasonably expect and hope for which would tell you what to spend the money on? Indeed, what assumptions are there about the post-Ukraine world which could serve as a basis for planning? Don’t hold your breath.
This is not to deny that trees have been sacrificed to produce impressive-looking strategy documents. With much fanfare, the US last year produced both a National Security Strategy and a National Defence Strategy (not necessarily consistent with each other), and Mr Rubio famously delivered some remarks at the Munich Security Conference recently. Naive commentators assumed that these documents would immediately be translated into action, just as they have been excitedly debating whether vague plans by European nations for R and D on long-range missiles will mean those missiles will be deployed in 2026, or whether we shall have to wait until 2027. But politics doesn’t work like that. These documents and speeches, and similar ones, are best understood to resemble the kind of letters children send to Father Christmas: they are essentially wish-lists. In the end, policy and strategy are what governments do, not what they say, and if we look at the afterlife of such documents we find that in general they just gather dust in cupboards. Anyone can produce an ambitious strategy document: the real issue is whether any of it is implemented, and very often it isn’t. You may remember Mr Obama’s famous “pivot to Asia,” which has finally led to … well, the recognition that the US cannot win a war with China and that its forces had therefore best un-pivot and stay at a discreet distance.
But back on Earth, there is a crying need for some real strategic thinking, as opposed to gimmicks or tweets. Now of course, as with documents, people talk about strategy from time to time, and they may even be convinced that they have one. The reality, though, is that what nations call strategies are often no more than a collection of ingrained habits. So during the Cold War I often heard representatives of different nations say things like “our strategy/policy is based on being a member of NATO.” Well, fine, but there’s an obvious logical gap there. Why are you a member of NATO? Not for fun, obviously, or for want of anything better. Presumably you have set yourself certain objectives, and you can better pursue some or all of them with NATO rather than without it. What are they? Well, assume you are a small European nation recovering from the War in the 1950s. Your objective is your national security but you know you can’t achieve that on your own, so you look for allies. It helps to have a large ally as well, if you can persuade them that your security is in their interest, and that they should be there as a counterweight to Soviet power. Thus NATO. On the other hand, being dependent on a single nation is not a good idea, so you also join the nascent EEC, and seek to play off the US against the French and Germans. You make an effort in each case to exert the maximum influence you can in these organisations, and place your people in important positions.
That is, roughly, the de facto strategy that a lot of nations pursued then and, with certain allowances, still do today. Which is to say that you start from the correct end of the train of logic, and you work from the general to the particular, from the objective to the detailed solutions. There is absolutely no sign that such a habit of thinking exists in the West today, or is even recognised to be theoretically necessary. What will happen is what always happens: those things that can be done or at least announced quickly, will be done, or at least announced, and politicians and pundits will try to present them as though they were part of some great Plan from the beginning. But if you could actually develop and implement a post-Ukraine strategy, then what would it look like and how would you do it?
The theory of this is surprisingly simple, although in the West these days it’s hardly ever undertaken, because it requires time and effort, and the results often don’t show up for a while. But let’s take a simple example, to show what’s not being done. As I’ve argued before, the only strategic objective for European states over the next generation is to retain as much political and security autonomy as possible in the face of a powerful and resentful Russia, when they themselves are largely disarmed. So if that’s a strategic objective, we can disaggregate that into a number of practical Missions. The Missions are of a very general nature, and might include, for example, ensuring the integrity of the land, air and (if applicable) maritime borders of the country. From those Missions, we can deduce a certain number of Tasks, which might include, for example, protecting the air borders of the country, demonstrating that they will be defended if necessary, and escorting away aircraft that come too close. From this, we can deduce a certain number of Capabilities, which will be needed to enable these Tasks to be carried out. They will include the capability to detect potential intruders at a distance, the capability to carry out routine patrol, the capability to scramble aircraft quickly if needed, and so forth. Now note that so far we have not touched on questions of equipment choice and money: they come later.
The last phase is to look at how, in practice, these capabilities are to be provided and what they might mean in detail. (For example, 24-hour air patrols are expensive and few countries would choose to follow that path.) So you would develop a Concept of Operations to deliver the capability which might mean, for example, increased investment in ground-based or airborne radars, but might just as well involve cooperating with your neighbour, whose radars already have adequate coverage, so that you provide more fighter aircraft for interception. Of course, equipment is not the same as capability, and if you are going to provide more aircraft, you also need to provide more aircrew, more training, possibly more training aircraft, and more support.
The detail of the kind of capacity development set out above can be complex and technical, but I defy anyone to try to insist that it is complicated in itself. It’s not. Rather, the West has so lost the habit of thinking in an organised fashion, from the correct end of the argument, towards a logical end-state that will take a certain amount of time to reach. Because of this, we do not recognise, and cannot understand, what the Russians are doing in Ukraine, and because of this we will never, absent some miracle, be able to formulate a sensible response.
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