Gettysburg and Ukraine

Back in August, Ukraine pushed into Kursk to the great excitement of German armor commanders. We rarely discuss that war in this forum, but over at Dad29's place I suggested an analogy.

It's been difficult to make sense of this offensive, and the reporting on it is wildly inconsistent depending on the outlet and which side they support. (This is perfectly normal in a warzone: "fog of war" and all that.)

However, it did occur to me to wonder if this was the Gettysburg Campaign of the Ukraine war. Analogously, both were the first time the defending army went on the offensive and actually invaded the other's territory in the full scale; both of them were principally intended as raids, with psychological effects on the enemy populace a secondary target. Both intend to take pressure off a long-suffering defensive region (northern Virginia/Donbass).

Both are major commitments of remaining maneuver forces, which entail significant opportunity costs. By deploying these forces in the north, Ukraine is risking what might have been important reinforcements. The Confederate government had wanted Lee to reinforce Vicksburg, but he took his forces into the north instead and suffered a strategic loss instead. That allowed Grant to capture Vicksburg and sever the Confederacy, then assume command in the east and press Lee's remaining army for the rest of its days.

I don't claim to know what the facts on the ground are over there; the fog of war is too thick right now. If the historical analogy holds, though, a Ukrainian loss here could spell the beginning of the end.

This week, the Bismarck Cables suggests that, in spite of major new loans guaranteed by stolen repurposed interest payments on stolen frozen Russian wealth, Ukraine needs a major intervention because Russia is taking a lot of territory. Failing very significant escalation by Ukraine and its allies in the West, he says, Russia is likely to prevail. 

I find this significant because the Bismarck Cables has always struck me as one of the more well-informed outlets writing on this topic, and also because it has always had a clear pro-Ukraine stance. Thus, this is an argument against interest rather than the cheerleading of one side or the other that makes up so much of the fog of war.

Escalations of the type he is advocating are unwise in the extreme. The war has been expensive enough that Russia is unlikely to repeat it. In my opinion we should pursue the peace that can be had. Putin after South Ossetia was likely to repeat his offense; after Crimea, even more so; but the Ukraine war has been ruinous on Russian manpower and war materiel. Letting them keep the majority-ethnic-Russian areas they have seized and held at such cost is not likely to encourage further aggression, but it could allow us to de-escalate in the Middle East especially as well as in Europe. 

Ukraine got out of Kursk about what Lee got out of Pennsylvania, and ultimately expended resources that now can't be used to reinforce lines which are, similarly, starting to collapse. They are still in a happier position. Lee didn't have the option of negotiating a peace that would have allowed the Confederacy to survive in the unconquered territories because, after all, the whole point of the war was to refuse to accept the existence of the Confederacy or the legitimacy of any secession from the Union. Putin has not asked for a similar level of submission from Ukraine, and doesn't have the power to enforce one anyway.

Rather than run the hazard of escalating the war into a direct NATO-Russia force-on-force conflict that could even become a nuclear exchange, we could help offer a peace that while minimally acceptable to Russia also prevents further Ukrainian losses of men and territory. The Kursk gamble did not pay off, but collapse can still be avoided without the need for significant escalation of an already-bloody war.

18 comments:

  1. Lee didn't have the option of negotiating a peace that would have allowed the Confederacy to survive in the unconquered territories....

    Neither does Zelenskyy. Any "peace" that he might negotiate that surrenders eastern Ukraine to Russia will be only temporary, lasting no longer than Putin thinks he needs to recoup, refit, and attack again.

    Because:

    Putin has not asked for a similar level of submission from Ukraine....

    He hasn't asked because he's not interested in submission. He's already said that Ukraine is not a legitimate nation in its own right, its Crimea was illegally given away to Ukraine by Khrushchev, Ukraine itself illegally broke away from the collection of Soviets (as did Poland and the Baltics), and he wants to bring all Ukrainians, not just the ethnic Russian transplants, home to Mother Russia.

    and doesn't have the power to enforce one anyway.

    Yes, he does, so long as the West in general continues its timidity in supporting Ukraine. On the contrary, it's Poland and the Baltics who lack the ability to halt Putin's invasions and continued push west to reconstitute the Russian empire. And having succeeded at that, there's no reason to believe he'd then stop--not against a Germany that has so little interest even in defending itself that it can't field a combat capable armored formation. Which leaves France and Great Britain by themselves, and France is hamstrung (if not paralyzed) by its far right that's bent on cozying up to Russia, and GB is unable to get out of its own way domestically, much less on foreign affairs.

    Eric Hines

    ReplyDelete
  2. It is exceedingly difficult to imagine Russia taking on NATO anytime in the next twenty years after the difficulty and losses sustained in this Ukraine endeavor. Desire is one thing, ability quite another. I don't think he's the sort to chronically over-reach though. I think he's smart enough to reset and adjust his tack.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Don't assume Putin's values coincide with ours, or with the West's generally. His pain points and the amount he's willing to suffer are quite different from ours. See the price he's willing to pay to gain yards in Ukraine. His sense of right and wrong is quite different from ours. Russia is not of the West, and it never has been.

    I can't imagine him not taking on NATO if he succeeds in conquering Ukraine. I suspect he's read NATO's Article V much more carefully than most of the political leadership in the NATO members, and I suspect he has a good read on the level of courage of those same NATO leaders, as well as on their nations' level of combat capability. Putin has, after all, successfully and repeatedly gotten our own government men to back down every time he nods toward his nukes.

    The only NATO members with the stomach to take on Russia are the eastern European ones, still only two-three generations out from under the Russian jackboots. And they don't have the capability.

    In the end, the Russian army doesn't have to be capable in any absolute sense. It just has to be more capable than the armies it's fighting. With "capability" defined by the Russian leadership, not by ours.

    Eric Hines

    ReplyDelete
  4. Capability is defined by the physics. That includes the demographics. Russia's median age is over forty. The bulk of the population is beyond fighting years, and the losses of those young enough to serve are on the order of a thousand a day.

    They've got a lot of old Soviet equipment. It doesn't seem to work very well. They're losing a dozen armored vehicles a day, fighting Ukraine (with substantial support from NATO). I don't think Ukraine itself is digestible for them, let alone Eastern Europe.

    I think this is Putin's last ride, whether he can call it a victory or not. If he's lucky: China may be eyeing his eastern flank, given the relative weakness his army has shown in the west.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Capability also is defined by will. Putin has it, the ones in the West with the physical capability don't. That "substantial support from NATO" isn't all that--not when NATO slow-walks the equipment the UA needs, or outright refuses to supply it, and of those it does trickle in, there are too many strings and restrictions attached, limits demanded by Putin.

    Putin is paying a terrific price--by our standards--for the gains he's making in Ukraine. He's making gains.

    The PRC is eyeing Russia's eastern flank--nearly all of Siberia. They don't need to fight Russia for it, though, the PRC is setting up its own Anschluss and absorption of Siberia by colonizing it under the guise of the development agreement they have with Russia, an agreement that allows the work to be done by mainland Chinese workers. Those workers' families are going along. Wait a couple of generations, and we'll see who has possession of Siberia.

    Eric Hines

    ReplyDelete
  6. Demographics are a problem for China too. It doesn't have a couple of generations. By 2100, there will be more Americans than Chinese.

    ReplyDelete
  7. The PRC has a long way to shrink before Russia can trouble it with population relocations.

    As for the US, with the Progressive-Democrats in charge, our population being larger than the PRC's in a while will be meaningless.

    Eric Hines

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, if they win we might blunder into the nuclear exchange. But you know, one war at a time.

      Delete
  8. "Don't assume Putin's values coincide with ours, or with the West's generally. His pain points and the amount he's willing to suffer are quite different from ours. See the price he's willing to pay to gain yards in Ukraine. His sense of right and wrong is quite different from ours. Russia is not of the West, and it never has been."
    This point I certainly must grant you. The Eastern mind sees things- especially the value of life- very differently, it's true.

    ReplyDelete
  9. The Eastern mind sees things...very differently....

    Here I'll nitpick briefly. Russia isn't of the East, either, and never has been, neverminding the Mongol overlay for a time.

    The East--by which I mean Asia, excluding Siberia, which has too little population to matter in this context--does think differently than the West along all the dimensions mentioned above.

    However, Russia--again excluding Siberia--is not of the East, either, and never has been. Putin thinks differently than both of us. And (perhaps I overgeneralize, but, I claim, not by much), so do Russians in general, based on the atrocities the cross-section of Russian society and culture are committing in Ukraine. A cross-section that runs from the foot soldier doing the raping and baby butchering and POW murdering through the NCOs and junior officers who participate or overlook through the senior NCOs and senior officers who condone such things through the senior and flag officers who order such things through the top command staff who add in orders to bomb hospital and residential neighborhoods and energy infrastructure for the explicit purpose of freezing Ukrainian civilians. Putin is only guy on top of and in charge of that pile.

    Eric Hines

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous5:53 PM

      I tell my students that “Russia is Russia. It’s not European, exactly, and it’s not East Asian, exactly. Sometimes it looks a lot like one or the other, but it isn’t either.”

      LittleRed1

      Delete
  10. Anonymous2:47 PM

    Well, if they win we might blunder into the nuclear exchange. But you know, one war at a time.

    Trivially interesting: it seems that replying to a reply isn't possible, or I'm missing something.

    To the point: I'm not so sanguine that a Progressive-Democrat government would blunder us into a nuclear exchange. They've shown over the last four years that they'll equivocate and count the attackee as much at fault as the attacker, and they'll continually back down in the face of natterings of nuclear weapons by our enemies. That strongly suggests to me that those will continue to the point of our whimpering defeat rather than any sort of kinetic exchange.

    It's the strategy not of peace through strength, but one of hoping for peace through diplomatically and so toothlessly delivered stern words.

    And that's assuming there's anything left that would actually sit in opposition to what we might consider enemies after the victorious Progressive-Democrats have eliminated the Senate filibuster and thereby consigned us to one-party rule where there'd not even be a loyal opposition; the minority party would simply be irrelevant, and Party will have restructured our judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court, and thereby eliminated its ability to serve as a check on the other two branches, becoming instead a rubber stamp of Party diktats.

    Eric Hines

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If that’s how it is, Mr. Hines, I’d say we will be needing to fight closer to home.

      Delete
  11. Grim, thank you for your assessment. I pay little attention to international military and diplomatic affairs, mostly because I have consistently proved to myself that I do not understand them well. I do count them as important.

    ReplyDelete
  12. If that’s how it is....

    There have been some folks, of import and of not so much, who've been saying that this election is momentous.

    Lee, of Utah, says that if Democrats win, they'd rule for the next 100 years. That may or may not be an exaggeration, but if the Progressive-Democrats (my label) win, it will be a national disaster.

    Eric Hines

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well they don't look likely to. Maybe God protects children, drunkards, and the United States of America.

      Delete
  13. Well they don't look likely to.

    Keep in mind that Georgia, Wisconsin (which already is experiencing "accidentally" insecured vote tabulation machines), Michigan, and Pennsylvania are not finished counting votes. The Dem city precinct strongholds in those States are still "counting" and don't expect to be finished before tomorrow morning.

    It's almost as if they need to know how many votes they need to deliver from those cities.

    Eric Hines

    ReplyDelete