How to Press Our Advantage in the Wake of Russia’s Failures

T he U.S. failed to meet its objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan for the same reason it failed to meet its objectives in Vietnam and Korea years ago: political failure.

Russia is failing to meet its objectives in Ukraine because of a different kind of reason: military failure.

That bears considering.

I do not wish here to relitigate Afghanistan and Iraq. Suffice it to say that if our only objectives had been deposing the Taliban in the course of hunting down al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and deposing the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, then we would have accomplished them without much difficulty and with minimal expenditure and loss of life; in fact, our objectives were grandiose and our political commitment unequal to that grandiosity. We were not ready to do in Afghanistan and Iraq what we did in Japan after World War II, and the cultural and economic specifics of those cases may have made a Japan-style reconstruction impossible at any level of American commitment.

The expenditures were heavy. The loss of life was considerable. We should always keep in mind the human toll of those wars. But there have been advantages, too: In essence, the United States went to war after September 11, 2001, and stayed at war for 20 years. The U.S. military is not only the world’s most sophisticated and well-equipped, it is also the most experienced of the world’s major militaries. As of 2019, we had almost 1.5 million veterans under the age of 34 and another 4 million aged 35 to 54. U.S. forces know their fighting capacities, know their logistical capabilities, know their strengths and their weaknesses. Our troops are quite limited in their ability to act as a national police force abroad or as an instrument of state-capacity building in countries whose people do not wish to be developed along Western liberal-democratic lines, but, as a fighting force, the U.S. military is like nothing else the world has ever seen. It is unmatched in its combination of firepower and brainpower.

The Russian military, on the other hand, turns out to be a paper tiger. While many of the world’s military experts had rated the Russian army second only to that of the United States in terms of its readiness and capability, Ukraine has exposed that as a fiction. Every army worries about bullets and missiles, but the Russians have been undone by much less lethal challenges — rain, among others. Russian armored vehicles have fallen to Ukrainian agricultural implements because of cheap and defective Chinese tires. Teen-aged conscripts rounded up from the schoolyards of Vladivostok have been shipped off to war, ill-informed and ill-prepared, and told they are hunting Nazis, which surely is understood to be a tall tale even in the hinterlands. Some Russian troops apparently were informed that they were going to war only as they were crossing into Ukraine. Russian corruption has left them poorly fed and poorly equipped, and Russian military incompetence has even fearsome Russian armored divisions being deployed in a way that one British military analyst describes as “suicidal.” A British estimate has the number of Russian dead in Ukraine already at 15,000 — more than were lost in the Russians’ decade-long war in Afghanistan.

The Russian army was fearsome on paper, and the Russian state is very focused and capable when it comes to a small number of tasks: terrorizing its critics and looting its people. But when they hit the field in a real confrontation, the Russians fell apart. It is worth keeping in mind that the Ukrainian government also is ineffectual and corrupt — only a little less corrupt than the Russian government by most prewar estimates — and that the Ukrainian military wasn’t exactly splendidly equipped and battle-hardened, etc. The Ukrainians are fighting bravely and deserve our admiration — and our help — but there were pretty good reasons for Moscow to think that it could conquer Ukraine with a few paratroopers and special forces.

Now, the United States finds itself in a position of great advantage. And we should work to preserve the advantages we have. By this I do not mean to put forward the horrifying proposition that we should send our forces into war willy-nilly just to keep them in practice, but we should take whatever steps we can to preserve our advantage in experience, in our knowledge base, and in our mastery of the practical logistical and support operations that have so flummoxed the Russians, without which fighting a modern war effectively is impossible.

We should also invest in one of the most important force-multipliers we can find: credible, confidence-inspiring missile defense. When Ronald Reagan proposed to develop a proficient missile-defense system in the 1980s, Democrats mocked it as “Star Wars,” a sci-fi fantasy. We have made considerable advances on that front since, as have a few other nations. But the most important limiting factor in our current confrontation with Vladimir Putin’s junta is Russian nuclear weapons, both the tactical and short-range weapons that are a threat to Ukraine and its NATO neighbors and the long-range missiles that are an existential threat to the United States.

Without those Russian nuclear weapons, the U.S. scope of military action in Europe would be effectively unlimited. That is why the United States should be working against those nuclear weapons on two fronts: by developing our missile defenses and by making the nuclear disarmament of Russia a strategic priority. Of course, Moscow is not going to agree to such disarmament unless it has no other choice. And putting Moscow in that no-choice position, through economic and diplomatic means — and through military means if Putin makes the mistake of attacking one of our NATO allies — should be a guiding principle in our current relations with Russia. We can hope for a better and more decent Russia post-Putin but, for now, we have to work with the Russia we have.

The Russia we have does not look as fearsome today as it did a few months ago. Our position toward Moscow should reflect that.