Winning the War in Ukraine

"170512-A-DN311-421" by 7th Army Training Command is marked with CC BY 2.0.

BY Henry Thayer

The first Principle of War for the U.S. Army is OBJECTIVE. Without a clear, realistic objective the best tactics, troops and equipment cannot succeed. So, step one in any military operation is to define your objective.

As the oft-quoted Sun Tzu pointed out, you must know yourself and know your enemy in order to win. Knowing both the enemy and our own alliances will be vital to defeating Putin in Ukraine. And it will be vital for the defense of the Free World. 

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Here is what we know about Putin: he is a tyrant. He does not think like a normal politician or statesman. People are baffled by his attack on Ukraine. “What does he hope to accomplish?” they ask. 

To answer this question, look at the Syrian Civil War, China’s crushing of Hong Kong, or even Russia’s second Chechen War. In each case, the approach was not to win the war and create a working solution; it was to crush the opposition. 

Perhaps the example of Hong Kong is most instructive. Up until recently, it was a vibrant city with a dynamic financial sector. It was a showcase for the PRC’s vaunted “one country two systems” policy. 

But Hong Kong could be annoying to the Chinese leadership in their insistence on their right to self-determination and free speech. So, Xi Jinping crushed freedom in the city. He did not level Hong Kong the way Putin is leveling the cities of Ukraine, but he crushed civil society. 

The fact that Hong Kong is now a symbol of Communist brutality is of little concern to Xi. What was a concern is that there was a Chinese city that enjoyed freedom and that would not obey. Such a thing was intolerable. So he discarded his treaty obligations and cracked down on the people of Hong Kong. And he got away with it. 

This is likely the initial objective of Putin: to crush a budding democracy and impose a compliant government. Having failed in that objective, he now seems to be falling back on a Syria- or Chechnya-type of outcome; total devastation with a pro-Russia dictator presiding over the ruins.

We must thwart his aims. 

I will address why below, but first we need to know how. And step one is a clear, achievable objective for the Free World. 

Putin fears a free, successful Ukraine on his border. So we must ensure that Ukraine survives and is both free and successful. Everything we do with regard to the war in Ukraine should serve this objective. Anything that does not serve that objective is purely optional, and anything that compromises that objective should be avoided.

It will not be easy to thwart Putin’s plans. He will do everything he can to prevent a free and successful Ukraine. And it is very easy to destroy things, far easier than it is to create them. So we should be ready for constantly changing forms of attack from Putin aimed at wrecking a free Ukraine.

The first part of realizing our objective is to help the Ukrainians expel the invading Russian army from their country. To this end we have so far done fairly well, but we need to continue to supply Ukraine with the weapons they need to drive the Russians out. After all, the Ukrainians have shown the motivation and the skill to not only fight the advancing Russians to a standstil, but to cause them to actually withdraw from the middle of the country. 

Anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles have been sufficient thus far. But to drive the Russian army out of Ukraine the defenders will need armor and artillery, as well as armored personnel carriers for their infantry. We are supplying this hardware. We need to be sure we supply it fast enough and in sufficient quantities to allow the Ukrainians a decisive advantage.

The second part is silencing the Russian artillery. If the Ukrainians push the Russians out, they may wind up with a frozen conflict in the Donbas. And if such a thing resulted in Ukraine being able to rebuild, it would be an acceptable outcome. 

But the problem is that Russian artillery, or at least missiles, can hit Kyiv from within Russian territory. While Russian artillery inside Ukraine is vulnerable to infantry, armor, and as well as artillery counter battery fire, artillery emplacements inside Russia can really only be hit with counter battery fire. And if we have learned anything from the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is that tyrants and fanatics will happily set up guns in residential areas, fire a few rounds (enough to alert the counter battery radar) and then move away so they can blame the other side for an attack on civilians. 

I don’t know the way around this dilemma. Perhaps leafletting to tell the residents not to let the artillery set up in their neighborhoods, or to warn them of the dangers, but even that is probably of limited utility. In any case, it is a problem we will have to confront. 

We should also encourage Turkey to keep the Bosporus closed to Russian warships. Ukraine is currently safe from naval bombardment. We should see that it stays that way. Every bit helps.

It would be nice if Ukraine could join the European Union, nicer still if it could join NATO. But these are secondary goals. The main point is to ensure Ukraine is free. A neutrality that exists on paper alongside a de facto alliance with Europe (essentially the status quo ante) should be acceptable. We can afford to be somewhat flexible on appearances, but must remain iron-willed in our determination that Ukraine is in fact free and can determine her own fate, including choosing her own alliances.

There are a few things we should avoid, as they are counter-productive. We should not hector India over its weak response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. First, it will be ineffective (and thus a waste of energy) because India still needs to buy Russian military hardware for some time to come. 

Second, India is extremely prickly about its neutrality. So, let them maintain the pose. Likewise, we should not push an overly moralizing tone with other neutral or Third World countries. They will react negatively. And we should not bother asking the Saudis and other OPEC countries to pump more oil. They won’t do it, and it just gives them an inflated sense of their own importance. 

Nor, however, should we let Russia control the narrative in Africa, South Asia, or Latin America. The Russians have been winning the information war in these areas. We need to fight back. Putin has launched not just a war of aggression, but a war of conquest. We should point that fact out. We don’t have to let the Russians equate it with the invasion of Iraq. 

Finally, we should avoid direct involvement of NATO forces. The Ukrainians have shown they are capable and willing to do their own fighting. NATO entry into the war would only be a propaganda victory for Putin.

There is also the information war at home. The Russians initially did not apply much effort in this regard, prompting some premature triumphalism. But the information war is, in fact, just starting in the West. We can see it on the Right in the form of Fox News and Tucker Carlson. A shocking number of Republicans in congress failed to sign a resolution supporting NATO. And some radical Libertarians are pushing the notion that concern over Ukraine is just a media-generated crisis and people are fools to fall for it (yes, I really saw this line). 

On the Left, it is the usual madness. Some claim that Russia is justified by NATO expansion, or the (imaginary) coup that ousted Yanukovich, or the Euro-Maiden protests that ousted him a second time. When those lines fall flat they fall back on inconsistencies in U.S. foreign policy (unavoidable in a complex world) and accuse us of hypocrisy. And then they will stir up emotions over war profiteering. 

We need to take the information war at home very seriously. It is something all of us can fight, and something all of us should fight.

There will be some who ask why we should care. And the answer is that the future of humanity is at stake. The tyrants were knocked back on their heels in 1989. We thought we had won. We thought that peace and freedom was going to be the new normal. 

And for a long long time it looked like we were right: Tiananmen Square might have been the last spasm of dying authoritarianism. Yugoslavia might have been an anomaly. Even North Korea seemed that it could not hold out for long after Kim il Sung died. But, in fact, the tyrants were retrenching. 

Now they think they are in a position to reassert their power. We have to stop them. The stakes for the whole world are too high to allow Putin, Xi, and others like them to achieve any success in such an undertaking.

Hank Thayer received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts, and holds both a B.S. and a Masters in Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. After serving as a U.S. Army Infantry Officer in the late 1980s, he has spent most of his professional life working in manufacturing. In addition to being an amateur historian he is a fair-to-middling shade tree mechanic.

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