The Offensive…

I’ll have more to say about the course of the Ukrainian offensive over time, but at the risk of being apocalyptically wrong (Russian army collapses tomorrow, for example) I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to say that Ukrainian efforts have been disappointing. This is true from both a results perspective and from a process perspective:

See also:

• Kofman and Lee
• Andrea Kendall-Taylor
• Howard Altman
• David Betz

Several things going on:

• Ukraine is struggling to integrate new technology into fresh formations. Significant casualties over the last 18 months have cut deeply into Ukraine’s human capital in ways that are difficult to remediate in a short period of time.
• Russia’s defenses a well-designed and well-resourced, and would be a tough nut for any army to crack. The Russians have proven far more adaptive and innovative than a lot of Western accounts have suggested.
• Ukraine does not have and will never have the kind of air superiority that US forces take for granted.
• Ukraine’s organizational military culture is a blend of Soviet and Western, and those two flavors don’t always go well together, especially during the middle of a conflict.

I don’t find any of this all that surprising; the military analysts I’ve been reading over the past year all cautioned that the goal of reaching the Sea of Azov was a lot to ask of the Ukrainian military. I think the Ukrainians themselves are fully aware of the difficulties, which is why they haven’t thrown their reserves into a bloody, potentially unproductive fight. Official US sources have also been quite cautious about the prospects of success (David Sacks is simply a liar when he claims that everyone believed the Ukrainians would sweep the Russians away). It’s also possible (because war is crazy) that we’ll see more movement later in the summer as attrition takes its toll on Russian defenses.

So where do we go from here? For one, it’s absolutely critical that the Russians aren’t allowed to turn a defensive success into an offensive success. It doesn’t look to me like the Russians have another big maneuver offensive in them, but it’s always hard to say. I think it’s also critical that the US and Europe continue to supply the Ukrainian war effort. The promise of long-term support matters on both the battlefield and at the negotiating table. But the Ukrainians need to ask themselves how many lives and how much national treasure they want to expend retaking fortified Russian territory. It’s very easy to let tactical and operational military thinking overtake grand strategy, and Ukraine’s national future is going to depend more upon its relationship with NATO and the EU than on whether it can retake the territory it has lost to Russia.