A Response to Phillips O’Brien in The Atlantic
Politics, Strategy, and Logistics in the Ukraine War
The Ukraine War is at a precipitous moment, strategically and politically. With the impending change in the US Administration, Trump equivocating on whether to continue support for the invaded nation and Putin teetering on the balance of escalation and domestic collapse has analysts entering the breach to explain the past and generate the future construct. I generally avoid partaking of these analyses because at this moment, none of us really knows enough about the ongoing narrative. Most of what is written amounts to conjecture of some sort, as does mine here. However, as analysis according to a specific framework, in this case strategy and logistics, there can be value in the exercise.
Perhaps if the abject negativity of O’Brien’s Atlantic article hadn’t gained so much traction as an explanation for the course of the war, I might have nodded past it. Had it been better written – and properly evidenced – I might have left it alone. Its argument is, on its face, plausible. But as a piece intending to define events (rather than offer a theoretically plausible scenario), it needs a response on its specific merits.
You do not need to walk away convinced of my position. I may be wrong. But I do take better account of the broader scope of the evidence, much of which O’Brien leaves out. Neither argument can claim factual ascendancy. And both could legitimately be correct simultaneously.
But you should at the very least be conflicted about his account. Broadly speaking, it is very difficult to read this in serious terms given the tone and temper of the writing, nowhere better exemplified than the opening. The casual nastiness critiquing the administration personnel in the opening is a sharp klaxon of warning as to what lies ahead. (1) And then the analytical language – “badly mishandled”, “hampering”, “throwing away a remarkable chance” – continues the exaggeratedly negative trend. The Atlantic did O’Brien a real disservice in not exerting a level of editorial authority over the piece. It lost credibility as a reasonable work of scholarship-based opinion and became a biased screed at that point. And the rest of the essay sustains that initial impression.
In line with my research on the war from its start, my response to his piece is concerned with interplay between strategy and logistics and the empirical progress of materiel and campaigning. I will follow the narrative and analytical points established in the original article, dealing with his points in turn, elaborating my analytical context, offering a different interpretation to the arc of events.
With that in mind, let us turn to the details.
“In defending themselves far more effectively [than expected…nevertheless] Biden and his experts have constrained [Ukraine]…”
To open his argument, O’Brien presents the current denouement, the matter of missiles and deep strike capabilities. The prohibition taken on face value, the matter of US control over the use of missiles for attacks against strategic targets in Russia, is blamed for depriving Ukraine of the war-winning, super-schwerpunkt destroying capability. To start, this position over-eggs the strategic effectiveness of deep strikes in degrading Russian military capacity to end the war in rapid fashion. And it would have to be a quick resolution, because an extended missile campaign against the Russian homeland would have given Putin a lever with his domestic audience. To date, the Allies have kept this resource off the table, and that is a remarkable achievement and a strategic advantage for the Allied and Ukrainian war effort. Furthermore, this position regarding deep strike neglects the opportunity costs that would accrue for focusing on that capability over air defenses and reconstruction. Understanding the importance of the Ukrainian public in this war, to recognize the critical role of domestic infrastructure to the effort, accepting significant losses in these areas to sustain an indeterminate offensive capability is a difficult argument to make. Especially given the general ineffectiveness of Moscow’s own strategic airpower campaign against Ukraine to force resolution in Putin’s favor.
And here we arrive at a core support to the logistics and strategy thesis which I will return to throughout this piece. That the political commentary about fickle allies has been a narrative camouflage to cover immutable logistical realities and strategic priorities. In this case, “Biden won’t let Ukraine use missiles in Russia!” is a better statement than to admit there are only so many missile systems that can be trained, deployed, supplied, and serviced in addition to the Life strategy requirements caused by the Russian missile campaign. Early in the war, the matrix of risk, reward, and opportunity cost was against offensive missiles as an opening capability. It serves now as Russia has been weakened by three years of war and in theatre losses, these offensive attacks can have greater effect. But logistics being a relatively fixed constraint early and throughout, other systems and materiel were the first choice for delivery.
“[Biden] has nevertheless made sure that the war has gone on much longer than it had to”
No, Putin did that. Logistics being limited, the Allies still put Ukraine on a counter-offensive footing in spectacularly rapid fashion, and have accelerated military and economic support throughout. Putin has been irrational. When he failed at three days and did not relent. When the offensive was stemmed within weeks. When the counterattack liberated occupied territories. When Prigozhin and Wagner Group went off the reservation. As Russian economic decline has worsened. With a counter-invasion unchecked.
At each critical point in the war for the Russians, Putin has refused a sensible resolution – declare it a Punitive Expedition, announce its Success, and Redeploy. If Russian Forces left Ukraine, what could the international community legitimately do? Most would advise Ukraine to drop claims and get on with rebuilding. Yes, the EU and NATO would advance, but in terms of Russia’s physical security, those were never an issue. On the matter of Russian corruption and the prosperity threat, it will be years before Ukraine reclaims its former economic health. Moscow would have time to sort itself out – with sanctions for the most part gone, getting back on track would not be that difficult. Rather than a frontier of arms, Moscow would create a prosperity sphere to inoculate its people against the rising tide in a westernizing Ukraine. (I’m only half-joking.)
In the face of Putin’s strategic irrationality, the Allies have supplied Ukraine’s war effort in both of its strategic prongs. The military campaign to dislodge Russian forces from Ukrainian territory, using land, air, and naval capabilities, and the Life campaign to protect, repair, restore bombed or liberated regions/locales. You can tell yourself whatever fairy tales that soothe, but the truth is that Ukraine was never going to be able to stop the Russian Army at the border with force of arms. To avoid this conflict, Ukraine needed to be part of a greater Russian political entity or NATO to maintain the integrity of that line. As an independent actor, its most effective strategy was liberation on the back of a defense in depth, and it would always take a significant amount of time (at least a year). But no Ukrainian army could have been stood up to defend the border without problem. There was no military answer to this, it will always be political.
Turning to the war we have, once Putin opted for an anti-population bombing campaign in earnest, it became clear Russia would endure through much bleakness, both for Ukraine and itself, to avoid accepting the loss. Putin would destroy a dam to catastrophic effect. Attack critical energy infrastructure. Sacrifice Russians lives at the cyclic rate, killing them off to pointless offensives in substandard equipment. Beg munitions and men form weaker allies. Strip allied and strategic commitments of capabilities and capacity (Syria). Tank the ruble and the economy and accept a future of Chinese vassalage. Intermittently threaten nuclear war. Throughout, Putin has escalated the cost of his losing war. And still, it remains well within the Allies’ capabilities to outpace Russia. But some of the cost is in *time*. The irrationality with which the Russian leadership is operating will require a loss that cannot be delivered rapidly. Consider the amount of time spent on Bolero, or the build-ups for both the conflicts in Iraq. Ukraine is fighting, building complex military formations and capabilities, fulfilling Life strategy requirements, building defense infrastructure – assembling the full arsenal to liberate the homeland and drive out the Russians takes time. Notwithstanding that against this backdrop Biden and the Allies have limited escalation while largely minimizing the Russian public as a positive force in this war.
No magical, quick win was possible because the materiel, manpower, and knowhow could not be <<blinked>> into existence in Ukraine. There are limitations to how much can be moved into Ukraine at a time. There are limitations to how quickly operationally relevant packages of goods and weapon systems can be assembled, trained for and delivered. And as the systems have become more complex, so too have the logistical burdens. But to ignore what all parties have achieved? Breezily, O’Brien references its troubles, “as Russia, by military and economic necessity…” one has to pause for failing to take account of just what helped to bring out those necessities.
“Jesus Christ! Now I’ve got to deal with Russia swallowing Ukraine!”
Outbreak of War in Europe evoked a spirited response from the American President. O’Brien, without the least evidence to support, frames this as Biden’s self-pity. I mean, let’s be clear: an open act of aggression, a conventional war, on the European continent justifies any excited utterance without any shame or judgement. It is a big, goddamned deal. And it is not unreasonable to worry what Russia taking Ukraine would mean to European and global security, and ultimately the United States. “Self-pity”? Please.
O’Brien harps that Russia’s opening weakness should have been taken advantage of in theoretical terms, but in the real world one must ask how? In the desperate opening days, Ukraine capitalized on what it could do to the best advantage of their war effort – protect Kyiv, harry the Russian lines. In the contingency, it was the reasonable thing to do. And while “the US had greatly overestimated Russian might,” so that “instead of unleashing shock and awe,” it turned out that “Putin’s military was a shoddy instrument.” That misreading was not in the least of Biden’s making. That is a deep, cultural problem within the American defense establishment going back to the rise of Net Assessment. But once the Russian forces massed and invaded, even had the US joined the fight, no fast victory was inbound –recall how long it took to dislodge ISIS from its Levantine Caliphate. Building the capacity and capabilities to liberate Ukraine would be a similarly significant undertaking.
Biden had the opportunity to “remake the geopolitical landscape.”
Yes, he did. And to a significant degree he has managed a successful shift in power to the Western Powers. Moreover, he has set a new standard for interventions: for the first time in recent history, the United States has lent its support in a subordinated fashion to an ally. Ukraine has led strategically, and the Allies have accommodated themselves to the target nation’s strategies of logistics. In its Logistics Strategy gainst the Russians forces, Ukraine would focus on the degradation of support to weaken the military operation in the country. With the Life Strategy, support of the public, civil defense and reconstruction would be prioritized. Furthermore, NATO has successfully expanded and the Western European alliance and is rethinking military industry in new ways. On the other side, Russia has few friends other than lame ones, the Black Sea is lost, China is deterred for the duration over Taiwan, and Syria is in the upheaval of regime change. Meanwhile, Biden has enjoyed *zero* domestic political support beyond his fellow Democrats, and has led the Ukraine alliance against powerful headwinds. And still the President has delivered a stunning run of deals. (Further, we have no idea what he has done behind the scenes.)
Then there is the nuclear strawman attack, that Putin’s only threat to the West was the very unlikely use of its strategic arsenal. However, this was not the lone vector of escalation. In fact, Putin has escalated, attacking civilian centers and critical infrastructure. There are other conventional means by which Putin can expand this war as well, in the Arctic/Baltic corridors, with aggressive cyber-ops via Kaliningrad, and so on.
O’Brien then returns to the timidity theme to argue that the war could have been won quickly. He denounces the schedule and flow of arms to Ukraine in the first months by asserting there was some unspecified Goldilocks balance of arms that could be deployed quickly to defeat the unweakened Russian Army. Ok, that’s bold, Cotton. Except I’ve never seen anything to explain what that would or could have been based in Ukrainian capabilities, time, space, complexity of platform.
Instead, the progression of arms has been quite magnificent from a logistics point of view. Of the arms, the simplest to assemble in usable packages and adapt to local capability were sent first. Of those closest to the fronts, and most likely to be shared capabilities, they were sent in first. In the emergency of the first days and weeks, Ukraine received enough to begin harrying the Russian Lines of Communication, hold at Kyiv, and begin staging a counter-attack. That was a significant achievement.
The Russian reconstitution of late 2022 and forward was on the back of the missile campaign and the Life demands it drove. And one must ask here, were deep strike capabilities more likely to end the war than air defenses would keep Ukraine in the fight? That is not a settled question. In assuming superiority of a particular strategic approach, O’Brien does not address these very consequential choices that Zelensky had to make and the Allies agreed to serve. The limitations of time and space to move materiel also constrain military versus other goods inbound to Ukraine. One could dismiss these priorities, but Ukraine’s economy has been critical to the war effort, the transport infrastructure necessary for the battle as well as the life, and so on. They are two sides of the same war effort, feeding from and sustaining the other.
And so, when his article demands that “if the US had helped Ukraine win in 2022”, we return to how. There was no way to stop Putin at the border but by force of political arms, ie, NATO. And that will be the only way to secure the peace between the states going forward. Once Putin decided on invasion, Ukraine was in no position to offer a corresponding conventional response to stop it at the border or expeditiously. To survive the opening would require sacrificing territory for time to assemble the correct forces. Once Putin decided he would not recognize each moment of loss leading to Autumn 2022 and chose instead to rain horror upon Ukraine’s cities, there were simply too many demands upon the logistics to deliver a schwerpunkt of military capability for a rapid conclusion. It would fall to a slower, broad attrition, to liberate the country. And considering the several fronts upon which this war is being fought and the current stumbles across them, it is not a terrible strategy to deal with the irrational leader in Moscow.
To close with the least important point of my response, it still bears considering that O’Brien’s argument demands that I believe that Biden captained a largely unprecedented strategy, collected a strong, international working alliance, has taken the Russian public off the table in alliance management, flowed an increasingly complex set of arms packages to Ukrainian front lines while also delivering Life materiel and funds, all while outfoxing recalcitrant Republicans, and which has now all gone to hell? And he has done such a terrible job, that he just sits and takes a constant torrent of criticism without a single, “Gimme a break, man!”?
It makes little sense. Yes, Ukraine officials have carried on a steady stream of pleas and criticisms, but nobody has noticed the Allies *do not respond*. While they continue to support. And now the US is jamming through the last billions before Biden leaves office in the event Trump cannot be swayed.
Ok.
Biden has not been ineffective, nor have the Allies been fickle. The war to liberate Ukraine from Putin’s invasion requires a measure of materiel and training that needs more time and space than the impatient are willing to accept.
Notes:
(1) I was surprised at his exuberance, because for Eliot Cohen to push this piece like he isn’t part of that DC Elite O’Brien is decrying either signals a lack of self-awareness or O’Brien’s bias.