Or, Europe after Ukraine
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s Substack
I’ve written several times about how the Ukraine war might end, and what might follow it. I’ve covered the inability of the West to understand what is actually happening in the war, and why, and what that means, as well as its obsession with the latest gadget and gizmo. I’ve pointed out that facile answers such as “spend more money” and “bring back conscription” are not possible, and if possible would not be effective anyway.
But things are moving on, and the West is beginning to fumble its way towards the recognition that it can’t get everything it wants, that it won’t be able to dictate either the terms of peace or the terms of a future relationship with Russia, and that it will have to have some kind of strategy for dealing with the Europe, and the world, which are now in the process of construction
But that’s about as far as things have got: a short pause in western dominance, an “agreement,” brokered by the US as a neutral party, a few grudging concessions while Ukraine is rearmed, and then off we go again. I don’t think there are words to adequately describe how detached these ideas are from reality, but at the moment that reality is too strange and frightening to contemplate, and the Overton Window of possible thoughts about the future hasn’t moved anything like far enough for even the bravest western politician or pundit to talk about it. That will come; not easily and not quickly, but it will come.
So we’ll have to do the work for them, or at least set out what some of the work may consist of. The problem is that to do it means unlearning what little the western political elites and the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) think they know about strategy and security policy, and beginning a process of remedial education from the ground up. I’m not the person to do that—I’m not sure who is—but I can perhaps offer a few ideas, with the usual caveat that I’m not a military expert of any kind.
Let me just explain first why this is necessary. Contemporary political elites and their parasites are essentially pig-ignorant (if pigs will forgive me) about security policy, strategy and military issues. To be fair, they are ignorant about many other things as well, but ignorance in this area is perhaps more worrying than in many others. It has complicated and messy origins, which are probably not identical in any two cases. Historically, war and strategy were important issues for states. They tended to be disproportionately of interest to the traditional Right (though there were exceptions such as in France) but politicians of all persuasions during the Cold War were obliged to think of them, and their practical consequences, to some extent.
But these days, the western political class functions according a weird mixture of right-wing economic neoliberalism and liberal normative fairy-dust, neither of which is especially intellectually sympathetic to strategy and military affairs, and can even be openly contemptuous of them. In the absence of a major war in Europe, or even the real prospect of one, military operations had become a bizarre mixture of “peacekeeping” or “nation-building,” and violent punishment beatings handed out to countries that didn’t do what we wanted. The actual amount of political interest in the military and strategic lessons from Afghanistan during the period of maximum western presence, for example, was pitifully small. It has not been necessary for the political class and the PMC to learn anything about strategic and military affairs, and suddenly, therefore, they find themselves completely lost.
Now of course it’s equally wrong to complain that the political class aren’t technical specialists in military issues. No-one expects a Defence Minister to be a military expert, any more than they would expect a Transport Minister to be a former train-driver. Their job is the political direction and management of the armed forces, and that calls for a different set of skills. Likewise, senior western military have spent their operational careers in small-scale wars or peacekeeping, and in any case need a whole series of other skills to do their jobs beyond just command in war. But—and it’s a big but—the western Defence establishments can reasonably be criticised for not keeping up to date with developments in Russia and China, and with the possibility of large-scale conventional war, and the preparations that would be needed for it. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, tweaking the Russian tail when you have made preparations for a potential conflict is one thing, tweaking the Russian tail without even thinking, so far as I can tell, about production, stockpiling and mobilisation, is culpable incompetence. (Come to that it’s not obvious to me what Defence Ministers of western nations have actually been doing for the last generation or so.)
Against that background it’s not surprising that there are essentially two vague concepts circulating about future western security, especially in the context of Russia. One is rushing after the latest clever technology which will somehow “protect” us and restore the western “technological advantage,” the other is some kind of new strategy, perhaps involving a relaunched NATO, that someone will work out, that will do something or other to make things better. I’m going to deal with both these issues, but not in isolation from each other because, as should be obvious, technological gizmos, no matter how clever, are pointless unless you know what you want to do with them, and how they fit into your overall plans. Thus, AI is not going to win the war in Ukraine, but it can help in specific ways: the Russians are already using AI to allow drones to select their own targets. I’ve already said enough about the West’s ignorance of strategy and its consequent inability to understand what is going on in Ukraine: here I want to switch the emphasis to how we might think about the future. That requires a clear concept of collective interest, which may in the end be impossible to find, but it also requires, as a minimum, some coherent idea of which technologies might be relevant and useful in a wide range of scenarios. This in turn requires a proper understanding of the dynamics of military technology development, which is a subject that hardly anyone in western governments even seems to be aware of.
Consider “drones”, for example. Now, unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) have been around in various forms since World War 2, and like any military technology, they need to be used correctly if they are to be valuable. In your childhood, you may have played Stone, Scissors, Paper or a similar game. Essentially, no choice is always dominant: scissors cut paper, paper wraps stone and stone blunts scissors. Everything depends on the choice your opponent makes. So with drones or any other technology: drones give you visibility at long range, and the ability to precisely attack small targets. On the other hand, their effectiveness is limited by weather, on the other other hand IR and other more exotic versions are starting to appear, on the other other other hand these are more expensive and difficult to operate. Likewise, drones can be very accurate and lethal, on the other hand there are now widely deployed EW counter-measures, on the other other hand the Russians are now deploying fibre-optic cable controlled drones that can’t be jammed, on the other other other hand killer drones capable of taking down enemy drones now appear to exist.
So the answer to any question about the value of military technology is: it depends. In particular, techno-enthusiasts have a habit of consigning older technologies to the rubbish bin because counter-measures exist, and are often much cheaper than the platform. Fine, but this is true of all technologies everywhere and every when. The expensive and sophisticated sword could be blunted by a much cheaper shield. And spears were generally cheaper than swords, and required less training. Throw away the swords. Come to that, the Mk 1 human being, with years of training and masses of expensive equipment, can be defeated by a single cheap bullet. Get rid of infantry.
The point, of course, is that all depends on context, from the mix of weapons on the battlefield, through the tactical and operational objectives of the mission, up to the strategic purpose of the conflict in the first place. Since no thinking seems to be going on at all at any of these three levels in western governments, let’s see if we can do it for them. But first, let’s look at a few examples of military capabilities of the kind that governments will have to consider, and why it all depends on context.
The first thing to bear in mind is to be very careful of the argument that “X” is “outdated on the battlefield.” Take the most apparently flagrant example: the horse. Armies of 1914 have been mocked ever since for deploying cavalry, but at the time it was the best means of conducting reconnaissance and screening your own forces. In the early stages of the War before fronts solidified, cavalry were used a great deal in their traditional function. And that’s just the West: on the Eastern Front there were massive cavalry battles, up to and including the Russo-Polish War of 1921. (Tukhachevsky was a cavalry officer.) Horses were of course used extensively by the Germans in World War 2, and as a cavalry officer I once knew liked to point out, a German horse cavalry unit was the only one to penetrate into the suburbs of Moscow in 1941. Come to that, the French Army used horses in Algeria: they could pass over virtually all terrain, required no maintenance or spare parts and seldom broke down.
Rather, military technologies—and this will be just as true in the future—are generally designed for a specific context, may later be adapted for others, and may be vulnerable, or have little value, in still others. I’ll take three examples. Let’s start with the Main Battle Tank.
Once the front lines had settled down at the end of 1914, traditional outflanking manoeuvres became impossible, and density of forces made frontal attacks difficult and costly. Although artillery could and did cause death and destruction in the German lines, its effects could only be guessed at, given the distance it was being fired, and troops had to be sent in effectively blind. The Germans soon learnt to leave relatively few troops in the front line, and to shelter during the bombardments. As the British troops (in particular) picked their way across the devastated battlefield, the surviving Germans would emerge from their shelters with their machine guns, and troops behind the front line would deploy to stop further advances. Since it was impossible to know where, if at all, the defences had been destroyed, and since it was also effectively impossible for the assaulting troops to communicate with their headquarters, attacks were costly and often futile.
So the British came up with an idea for an “armoured machine-gun destroyer,” able to cross the open ground, crash through the barbed wire defences and enable the troops to advance. After the war, visionaries including Tukhachevsky and De Gaulle developed fantastic notions of entire tank armies swarming unopposed across the battlefield. Whilst it is true that there were very few countermeasures available at the time, the reliability and mobility of tanks was not remotely compatible with such fantasies even as late as 1940. Whilst the Germans made effective use of tanks combined with aircraft and radio communication to disrupt the French Army in 1940, air power soon made the life of tanks difficult, and man-portable anti-tank weapons were developed towards the end of the war. (Tanks fighting tanks, by the way, was a development that the originators had not anticipated.)
The death of the tank was loudly proclaimed after the 1973 MiddleEast War, when the Israelis attempted large-scale cavalry charges against infantry armed with anti-tank weapons, and came off worse. But this was a classic example of over-confidence in one weapon, and not thinking about the wider context. Already, the British had begun to develop compound armours to resist anti-tank weapons, and the last fifty years have seen a dazzling profusion of active and passive defensive measures against anti-tank weapons. In turn, and as seen in Ukraine, missiles have been optimised to attack the top surface of tanks, usually less well protected. And of course counters to that have started to appear in the form of anti-drone cages.
It will be apparent, then, that “is the tank obsolete?” is the wrong question to ask. It depends on the context, it depends on the objective, it depends on the enemy, it depends on what other weapons are being used. Above all, it depends what you want to do. The real question for western governments can be summarised as follows:
“After the war in Ukraine, and for at least the next generation, does the West foresee the need for armoured, highly mobile, protected firepower, better armed and protected than infantry fighting vehicles, and in addition to other weapons employed in parallel, and if so in what strategic context?”
Now of course even that itself is only part of the question. There is a prior question about whether the West ever anticipates a conflict with a peer adversary on land again. There is a secondary question of whether the tank (and if so what kind of tank) is the best means to provide for some part of this need. So far as we can tell, the Russians in Ukraine have not made extensive use of modern tanks, and there have been few of the expected tank-on-tank duels. They appear to be using them in their traditional role as mobile protected firepower at a distance. From the videos available, it looks as though the Russians conduct most of their attacks with vehicles from the BMP series, rather than tanks, and with drone and artillery support. Such tactics seem to work well enough in Ukraine, but of course that context is very specific.
I have seen no attempt at all among western pundits to address such issues in any depth. Indeed, the received wisdom still seems to be that western equipment and doctrine is inherently superior, so there is no need for any re-thinking. And the same, so far as I can see, applies to airpower, where the question “is the manned aircraft obsolete” is scarcely asked, and even if it were, that’s the wrong question anyway.
Consider: the military use of the aircraft came out of the same frustration as the development of the tank In this case, the hope was to “leap over” the enemy defences, and attack vulnerable rear areas. Some enthusiasts saw the aeroplane as a way of landing a quick “knock-out blow” on the enemy’s country and ending the war in days. Others hoped it would rule the battlefield and destroy troop concentrations and fortifications. It was generally believed at the time that, in the words of Stanley Baldwin in 1932, the attacking aircraft would “always get through.”
At the time, indeed, there was every reason to think this was the case. There was no way of reliably detecting and identifying aircraft until they were very close, and no way of relaying and amalgamating such information and ordering a response. By the time fighters could be scrambled, the attacking aircraft would have released their weapons, and it was impossible to communicate with the fighters (whose endurance was anyway quite limited) once they were in the air. This enabled a surprise attack to destroy a large part of the enemy’s Air Force, which is what happened to Poland in 1939, to France in 1940 and even to the Soviet Union in 1941. But not to Britain in 1940. Why?
The short answer is radar, which permitted the British to see attacking German aircraft and organise a response. But in reality radar was only part, albeit a very important one, of a capability which was developed from the mid-1930s. The full capability was based on an appreciation of the strategic situation, and the belief that manned daylight bombing raids were a threat. The result was the development of fast monoplane fighters, the construction of new aerodromes, the setting up of an effective command and control system, and the integration of radar with other forms of warning and reporting. Of course, radar was not the end of the story. Countermeasures to radar were developed even during the War, new types of radar were developed, electronic counter measures and counter-counter measures proliferated thereafter, and missiles were developed especially to target radar systems.
The manned aircraft changed radically in size and speed, went from flying above interception range to flying at very low level to avoid radar detection and missiles, to becoming an all-purpose platform often acting in small numbers against targets that could not shoot back. In Ukraine, the Russians have sought control of the air through the use of missiles, and where they have used aircraft directly it has often been at long range, launching stand-off weapons. Long-range drones have been used by both sides, but they are subject to jamming and if flown automatically cannot change targets, or cope with the unexpected.
Where does that leave us? Well, at a minimum it leaves us with the following question:
“After the war in Ukraine, and for at least the next generation, does the West foresee the need for manned aircraft to perform one or more defined combat functions, in what relationship to other weapons such as missiles employed in parallel, and if so in what strategic context?”
I’m not holding my breath waiting for an answer, or indeed for the question even to be asked. But in the absence of knowing which capability you want, and why you want it, transient enthusiasms for this or that piece of military equipment are pointless.
There are many other possible examples, but I’ll just touch quickly on a completely different one. The aircraft carrier has been pronounced dead more times than I can remember, but more countries now operate them than at any time in history. Once again, though, the issue is not a piece of equipment, but a capability.
An aircraft carrier is the heart of a capability for force projection. That is to say, it enables a country to project land, sea and air forces further than it otherwise could when operating from its national territory. In turn, this provides a whole series of potential political and strategic advantages. A modern carrier can carry combat aircraft, early warning aircraft, helicopters of different sorts, and a contingent of troops, often up to battalion equivalent strength. It will also have a fully-equipped hospital, and facilities for repair and maintenance of its equipment. It will have intelligence-gathering capabilities, secure communications to home, and the capability to command and control operations. However, it also needs escorts for anti-air and anti-submarine protection, and is usually accompanied by a supply vessel.
Such large ships have always been vulnerable: so far as I know, the first carrier to be sunk in action was HMS Glorious off the coast of Norway in 1940. As with all capabilities, the trick is to take advantage of the strengths of the weapons whilst avoiding the weaknesses as far as possible. To say that a carrier can be sunk by a cheap missile is therefore beside the point: that has always been the case. The idea is to keep the carrier out of danger, and protect it against the unexpected. There are certain areas, notably narrow maritime straits or areas close to the shore, where carriers should never be deployed anyway.
One of the primary reasons for deploying carriers is sea control: the ability to control which ships pass through which areas. Often, the main purpose of this activity is political and deterrent, and the submarine, which can certainly sink hostile shipping, is an essentially discreet and hidden weapon which cannot be used for deterrence or enforcement purposes: these days submarines do not carry deck guns, and spend their time submerged. If you want to carry out helicopter patrols, chase pirates in small craft, board ships or query sightings on any large and organised scale, you have to either have a secure (and expensive) land/sea base out of which to operate, or have a carrier somewhere in the mix. The same applies to evacuating nationals in an emergency, rescuing hostages and so forth, where the sea is the favoured means of passage. So once again, the question is not about equipment, but the maintenance or otherwise of a capability. It would run:
“After the war in Ukraine, and for at least the next generation, does the West foresee the need for a capability for maritime power projection at any level of force, benign or confrontational, in what relationship to other weapons such as submarines employed in parallel, and if so in what strategic context?”
Once more, I should be astonished if any thinking of this sort was actually going on.
I hope that the foregoing is enough to dispel the idea that the post-Ukraine salvation of the West will come from pursuing this or that gizmo, or this or that new technology. The fact is that, ever since the end of the Cold War, the West has been strategically adrift, its procurement philosophies and its force structures pushed this way and that by political and financial pressures, and handicapped by the oscillation between general lack of interest by the ignorant political class and their sudden violent enthusiasms. Moreover, since political leaderships had very little idea what to do with their militaries any more, those militaries, like the rest of the western public sector, have been treated as canvases upon which the social and economic designs of the PMC could be inscribed. It is only now, in the shadow of Ukraine, that people are beginning to wonder whether a bit more attention to strategy, structures and doctrine might not have come amiss. As it is, there is a total confusion now between what western armed forces should be for and what in practice they are asked to do. (David Hume sighs, and says, Why do people still confuse Is and Ought?) Western states have no security policies as such; all they have is a list of things they do. Some of these things are a matter of habit, some are constraints from the past, few are freely and rationally chosen from a series of alternatives.
No doubt there will be post-Ukraine Security Reviews: some may actually be useful. But the majority, unfortunately, are likely to follow the pattern of the last thirty years, and limit themselves to saying (1) the world is a complex place with all sorts of difficult issues and so (2) we need to keep doing what we are doing, but also buy equipments X, Y and Z. It would be wrong to criticise too much: the people who write such documents (I’ve been involved in small ways) are generally very limited politically in what they can say and what conclusions they can come to, as well as by the enormous weight of the past and the present.
But maybe we can do better than this. If we could start with a clean(ish) sheet of paper, how would we go about designing a security policy for Europe after Ukraine which would be more than just a collection of equipment gimmicks and repackaged current policies? I think we could begin from two basic judgements.
The first is that the post-2014 policy of containing Russia has backfired disastrously. Far from Ukraine being a glacis against Russian attack, a well-armed advance post of the West with massive defensive fortifications, it provoked the very attack it was intended to prevent. Instead of being a deterrent, it was viewed as a provocation: a result that really should not have surprised anybody with the faintest acquaintance with Russian history. And even the troglodytes who would actually have welcomed a Russian attack, licking their lips at the thought of defeat and regime change in Moscow, will have to accept that their hopes have gone disastrously wrong. By every measure—military, political, strategic, economic—the West is weaker now than it was before the war, and there is no obvious way in which these weaknesses can be remedied.
Thus, attempting a repetition of the same policy would be pointless and potentially disastrous, even if the Russians would somehow permit it. The West (including the United States) does not have, and cannot acquire, a conventional capability to “balance” or even approximate, that of Russia: even very large numbers of surface ships, submarines and fighter jets are not relevant here. (Scissors, stones and paper again.) So trying to rebuild large conventional ground and air forces for some hypothetical conventional conflict with Russia is not worth the effort, even if it were possible. That does not mean abandoning ground forces entirely, as we shall see, but it does mean using them for sensible things.
In any event, where would this hypothetical conflict take place, and what would it be about? Let’s look at a map. First, it seems improbable that Russia, the largest country in the world, needs any more territory, still less that it is prepared to fight for it. So there are really only two possibilities. The first is a territorial or border dispute with a neighbour. Assuming that Ukraine is governed by a sensible neutral government, what other possibilities are there? For a start, it’s very hard to imagine Estonia or Rumania deliberately entering into a conflict with Russia over borders (or vice versa for that matter.) What would be the point and what could they hope to gain? Likewise, whilst NATO, in absorbing Finland, has thoughtfully provided itself with a very long and indefensible border, it is hard to see why either side would want to fight over it.
Second, though equally improbable, would be a major crisis between Russia and “the West”or “Europe,” which led to large-scale conflict. As before, though, there are very few actual areas in which this could take place. Here, we are once more conceptual victims of the Cold War, where massive armies actually faced each other directly (as indeed they had often done throughout history.) Again, it’s enough to look at the map. But assuming, for some unearthly reason, that Russia decided to attack through Rumania, then the West could not usefully oppose them. This is not because the Russians are supermen, nor because their technology is necessarily hugely superior, but rather because of geography, and you can only really change that by draining the Atlantic. Moreover, even in a conflict with a (relatively) well-armed state such as Poland, it is likely that the Russians would mainly use long-range missiles to destroy airfields, troop concentrations, logistic depots, command and control centres and transport hubs, after which it would largely be a question of picking up the pieces.
The second is that defeat in Ukraine is going to change the western strategic landscape substantially, and in ways that we cannot really predict. What we can say is that it risks another unfreezing of political differences that were suppressed during the Cold War, only to emerge very briefly at its conclusions. Anyone following the Ukraine crisis will be aware that it has led to all sorts of wild ideas about who should own which territory, who used to own it, who wants a bit of post-1991 Ukraine, and so forth. This is not surprising, since the massive movements of borders and populations after 1945, essentially decided by Stalin for security reasons, have left legacies which have never really played out, and which anyway have no ”just” or “fair” solution. This problem arose briefly after the Cold War, but was in general contained, with the significant exception of Yugoslavia. One largely-unacknowledged reason for expanding NATO was to try to bring as many states as possible within a structure which would constrain their wilder territorial aspirations and historical grievances.
But if anything, defeat in Ukraine is likely to liberate these tensions once more. NATO itself will be at best unpersuasive, at worst redundant, as an organisation. It will likely continue in some form because no-one will want to take responsibility for killing it, but it is not equipped to manage territorial and political disputes of this kind. Nor really is the EU: managing major political tensions is not the same as managing milk quotas.
For generations now, the Europeans have made use of the United States as a counterweight to Soviet and then Russian size and power. As I’ve pointed out many times, the US never “defended” Europe, but it could be brought into play as a balancing political force in the event of a major crisis in Europe. After the first live test of this hypothesis, it turns out that it was wrong, and was probably wrong all along. The US is not now in a position to offer Europe anything important, and given the state of its economy and its military, this is probably not a bad thing for them. For a long time, Europeans have worried about isolationist voices in Washington gaining the upper hand. Now, they probably will, but one is tempted to say that in the end it probably doesn’t make a lot of difference. On the other hand, certain European countries may now decide that, in reality, they would be better improving slightly their relationship with Russia.
A fragmented and abandoned Europe is therefore going to have to do some hard thinking. We must hope that, for the first time in a very, very long time, Europe will finally take Russia and Russian concerns seriously, and move beyond the stark fear of the Cold War and the equally unreasoning sense of superiority that followed it. This is going to be a massive development, and will require an equally massive political change: perhaps equivalent to that post-1945, when many existing political groupings were simply swept away. The epic sulk of which I have often spoken can only last so long, when capacity for action is so limited, and history suggests that in such situations new political forces will eventually arise and find popularity.
Europe will thus find itself in a familiar situation: a series of weak states in the neighbourhood of a large and powerful one, and on this occasion one they have deliberately alienated. Russia is not going to invade Europe, but that’s not the issue. The mere existential fact of its size and power, together with the weakness of its neighbours, will condition political relations between the great power and the rest. Some westerners find this hard to understand (Americans, in my experience, find it impossible) but it is a fact, and so understood in most parts of the world.
The best response, in my view, would be two-fold. The first would be the recognition of common interests by European states, including the perception that some interests may not in fact be common, or shared very unevenly. This argues against the creation of yet more security bureaucracies and treaties, and rather for ad hoc cooperation (which might include the United States, and for that matter other external powers) on issues of common interest. Such cooperation will lead naturally to force structures and procurement to support them. The greatest common interest will be the affirmation of independence and collective identity: not in an aggressive fashion, since that would be pointless, and not trying painfully to identify common interests where they do not exist, but in a fashion which, to the extent possible, acts positively in the balance of power between Russia and Europe.
Classically, this is done by the affirmation of borders and interests. So it would make sense to have fighter aircraft to patrol airspace borders and the North and Baltic Seas, often organised multilaterally. Likewise, aircraft optimised for anti-submarine patrols would be a good investment, whereas aircraft for penetration and ground attack would be a waste of money, as well as potentially destabilising. Submarines and anti-submarine frigates and destroyers might well be appropriate in the circumstances. Likewise, preserving at least some ground forces is a traditional way of expressing national sovereignty and a willingness to defend it. All of this would be part of a consistent, essentially political, strategy to increase European independence and freedom of action in the face of its giant neighbour: paper to wrap stone, stone to blunt scissors. No doubt paranoid forces in Moscow could consider such actions potentially aggressive, but that’s noise in the international system that will just have to be lived with.
Beyond that, there’s a need for strategic decisions about force projection, bearing in mind that there are no vacuums in politics, and it can be assumed that others from elsewhere in the world will make their plans to intervene when it is clear that Europeans cannot. But those decisions will be difficult and are anyway some way down the line.
Of course, we should never have started from here. I can only reflect that if better decisions had been made thirty-odd years ago, we wouldn’t be in this situation now. Some of us thought at the time that it was urgent to find a way of living together with Moscow, but none of us had the status or influence to affect the policies that were chosen. There is now another opportunity to make sensible decisions, in a situation where Europe is massively weaker, and the United States is effectively out of the game. The best hope, ironically, is that such decisions are often forced upon states by factors they cannot control, and whether they like them or not.
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