European defense requires an army. Ukraine has one.
European defense requires an army. Ukraine has one.
I t is now apparent to any candid observer that Ukraine needs NATO. But it is also true that NATO needs Ukraine.
According to some accounts, at the Tehran conference of Allied leaders in 1943, Winston Churchill told Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that the pope wanted a voice in any post-war arrangements regarding Poland. To this, Stalin reportedly replied, “Oh really? How many divisions does he have?”
Vladimir Putin is probably asking the same question about NATO right now. The answer is: not many.
As a result of a series of decisions made during the Clinton, Bush, and, especially, Obama administrations, NATO has virtually disarmed itself. At the end of the Cold War in 1989, the United States had some 500,000 troops stationed in Western Europe. Now, we have 30,000, with practically no tanks. The British have removed virtually all their forces from the continent. Germany — which is showing itself increasingly unreliable in any case — has cut its army from twelve divisions down to four. The cold fact of the matter is that the only serious NATO ground force east of the Rhine is the Polish Army, which has 180,000 active-duty servicemen. It’s not enough.
But then there is Ukraine, which has 450,000 active-duty servicemen, more than all NATO forces east of the Rhine combined. If properly armed, and backed up by Anglo-American air and sea power, they could be formidable, and consequently, very valuable.
We need to be realistic. Nuclear deterrence is dead. During the Cold War, we were able to deter a Warsaw Pact invasion of West Germany by threatening nuclear war if they tried it. But no one believes that the United States would do anything like that today. If Russia moves into the Baltic States or even Poland, the United States is not about the push the thermonuclear-war button, and Putin knows that. Consequently, the only way to be able to deter war is to be strong enough to defeat a conventional attack by non-nuclear means. That requires an army.
Again, we are in a pre-war situation, and we need to honestly assess our strengths and weaknesses. America’s military strength lies in our technological virtuosity. Slugging it out in a heavy-duty ground war is not for us. The Anglo-American allies’ most important contributions to victory in World War II were the actions of our naval and air forces, which cut off Nazi Germany from access to the resources of the world and devastated the German economy, making it impossible for the Germans to fuel their planes and tanks. The role of our industrial might in delivering arms, transport equipment, and other supplies to the Soviets was also critical. But it was the Soviets who actually did most of the fighting and dying at the front required to defeat the Wehrmacht.
The Red Army achieved a great victory at Stalingrad, but they lost 250,000 men doing it. That is more than the U.S. Army lost in the European theater of operations during the entire war. And that’s a battle they won. When they lost, the death toll was far worse.
In contrast, the British and American Arnhem campaign (Operation Market Garden) is remembered with regret as a “bridge too far” defeat because 15,000 troops were killed, wounded, or captured in exchange for modest territorial gains and the infliction of comparable losses on the enemy. If it had occurred on the Eastern front, the Soviets would have considered that a victory.
For a sober assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Americans as soldiers in serious land warfare, readers would be well-advised to put aside the feel-good books of Steven Ambrose and the like and investigate the findings of more analytical works, such as Max Hastings’s Armageddon or T. R. Fehrenbach’s classic This Kind of War. Put simply, it’s not our game. And those works refer to the Second World War and Korea. Our current tolerance for casualties is far less.
Today, as in World War II, our strength lies in our technological arms. We have marked naval and space superiority, and our air force is the best as well — although our excessive aircraft costs raise questions about our ability to replace losses in any prolonged conflict against a capable adversary. But on the ground, we are simply not there, and we are never going to be there in either the numbers or commitment required to hold the line in Europe.
The folly of allowing Ukraine to be defeated may be usefully compared to the most famous past Western strategic leadership failure, which of course are the mistakes of the 1938-40 period. In making these comparisons, I am not attempting to draw an equivalence between Putin and Hitler or Biden and Chamberlain. While I despise Vladimir Putin, I would be the first to concede that he is a much nicer man than Adolf Hitler. His goals are different too. Hitler’s goal was territorial conquest followed by genocide. Putin just wants to restore the Soviet empire. As for Chamberlain and Biden, readers are welcome to sort out the similarities and differences for themselves. But while the actors may be different, they are playing the same roles in a similar drama.
So, putting aside issues of the motives for various actions, let’s consider the consequences: As a result of the 1938 Munich Pact and their decision to remaining passive while the Nazis defeated Poland, the Western allies allowed first 35 Czech divisions, and then 39 Polish divisions and 16 brigades to be deleted from their order of battle. By comparison, the entire French Army defending the Third Republic in 1940 was 94 divisions, aided by ten divisions of the British Expeditionary Force. Facing the Nazis alone, they lost.
The lesson if history is this: If you need to repel an invasion, it’s a terrible idea to allow the equivalent of 82 allied divisions to be eliminated. In the current situation, the foolishness of allowing Ukraine to be defeated should be even more apparent, because unlike the Anglo-French allies of 1940, NATO doesn’t have 104 divisions.
So what should we do now? Some, taking Putin at his word (which is a bad idea), say that the problem is NATO expansion. Exactly the opposite is true. The reason why Georgia and Ukraine have been attacked is because they are not in NATO. If the Baltic states were not in NATO, they would have been invaded already. By refusing admission of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO in 2008, we essentially posted a sign at their Russian borders saying “open to invasion.” That needs to be rectified.
Because of the attitude of Germany and others inclined to appeasing Putin, it is not possible to get Ukraine into NATO in anything like the short time required to prevent invasion. But that is unnecessary. The U.S. can move immediately on its own to provide not only ample arms, but air cover for Ukraine, and declare that any Russian air or ground forces moving into Ukraine may be subject to our air or missile strike. Let’s be clear. Russia has no more “right” to bomb Kyiv than it does to bomb Paris.
To those who say such a course would involve war with Russia, I would point to the example set by the Soviets themselves in the Korean War. In that conflict, they provided arms and air support to their North Korean allies, while not sending in ground troops and otherwise staying out of the war themselves.
In any case, this is the only way now to deter invasion. Economic sanctions — especially the half-hearted economic sanctions currently being threatened — won’t do the job. Much more powerful economic sanctions against Italy, Germany, and Japan in the 1930s did nothing to dissuade their programs of conquest. But aggressors launch invasions because they feel sure they will win. By placing the success of the invasion in doubt, we may be able to deter it. Or if not, with the Ukrainians doing the heavy lifting, but us tipping the balance, defeat it.
Putin is committed to restoring the Soviet empire. If we don’t help the Ukrainians make a stand now, we need to ask the question: Who is going to stop him?