War in Ukraine — a preliminary audit

On 20 January, I chanced my arm with a view on Russian intentions in Ukraine: Putin needs to tread carefully in Ukraine. The title has proved reasonably accurate but I got two things completely wrong: first, the Russian army has proved far less competent at combined arms warfare than I and most observers had imagined; second, I made the fundamental mistake of confusing my sense of what was rational with Vladimir Putin’s. Both points deserve a little more attention.

The Russian army has embarked on the largest operation it has undertaken since 1945. Scale and complexity will have brought their own challenges and they will get better at their operational procedures the longer the conflict goes on; NATO armies deploying at similar scale would probably have encountered similar problems. But beyond the pure friction of war at scale, the Russians have made tactical decisions that bear no critical scrutiny at all; a couple of operational cameos will illustrate the point.

The decision to embark on what is known as a force economy opening move — just enough military violence to achieve initial objectives without recourse to overkill — proved disastrous. The heliborne assault by Russian VDV airborne forces on Antonov Airport in the Hostomel suburb of Kyiv was overambitious and completely underestimated the Ukrainian response. Light airborne infantry is hideously vulnerable to indirect fire and determined counter attack, and the Russians were on the receiving end of both. As a result, the overall operation was dislocated, elements of an elite formation wasted and tactical escalation became the only available response, thus inverting the original force economy intent.

Well into the second week of the war, Ukrainian air operations are continuing and Russia has yet to gain air superiority, let alone the air supremacy it would have assumed by the end of the first week. The main reason for this is Ukrainian tactical dexterity, aided and abetted by the egregious Russian failure to mount an effective SEAD (suppression of enemy air defence) operation. Every major conflict, from the Arab/Israeli Six Day War in 1967 to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, has had an overwhelming attack on the defending aircraft, airfields, air defence radars and air command centres as its overture and the Russian failure to keep to this well-established score is inexplicable. It may be that, again, overwhelming force was forgone in order to gain advantage in the information war, playing to both international and domestic audiences. In which case the Russian planners have been revealed as either complacent or too clever by half.

I have no idea how to address the teeming atavism of Putin ’ s concept of rationality and I will certainly avoid any lurid speculation on his psychological condition. There is, though, a recurring theme in the responses to the Russian leader ’ s actions. Successive commentators, often the diplomats or spooks paid by their countries to divine the thoughts of potential opponents, have noted this is not the Putin I knew. This of course begs the question: did they ever know him in the first place? Or were they so captive to their own preconceptions that they were incapable of seeing clearly the enigma confronting them? If so, they were displaying no more than a standard human fallibility. Quite how strategic assessment accommodates the historical, cultural, experiential and prejudicial influences competing for space inside the minds of both a potential enemy and our own analysts remains a challenge.

Looking more widely, we ’ re sufficiently far into this conflict to begin to pick out some of the bigger emerging issues. Perhaps the first is: why did Putin make his move now? Few leaders enjoy complete discretion about when they go to war and even Hitler ’ s concerted aggression was intended to culminate in war in 1942, rather than 1939, but history gets a vote. Would it not have been wiser for Putin the allow Nord Stream 2 to gain full regulatory clearance and insinuate Russian gas supplies even further into the European economic bloodstream than is already the case? Would it not have been wiser to wait for the pipeline infrastructure that will facilitate Russian energy supplies to China to be better developed in order to switch the flow of energy from west to east? Would it not have been wiser to let the Biden Administration become further emasculated after the midterm elections in November or even let the spectre of a Trump candidacy in 2024 raise its head? The questions are rhetorical, but what is not clear is the supervening imperative that led Russia to war now and therefore any sense of the vote history has made.

Second, Russia yesterday revealed its conditions for negotiation. It demands that Ukraine recognises the right of Russia to rule Crimea, the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces (“republics”) of Ukraine and neutrality to be written into the Ukrainian constitution. Really? The first two conditions are already in de facto existence. So for a constitutional sub-clause Russia is willing to face economic devastation, give the West a new sense of unified identity, accept German re-armament and embarrass its Chinese client by its gauche adventurism. If so, and at face value, this amounts to a strategic miscalculation of historic proportions.

Third, has Putin become the world ’ s most effective spokesman for Green policies? The environmental case for Net Zero is well rehearsed, but has Russia just revealed the military strategic case as well? At the moment, securing traditional supplies of energy is front and centre of every European government ’ s priorities and the immediate response will be to diversify sources of supply. As the full implications of energy dependence sink in, the more considered response will be to accelerate the development of alternative and replacement sources of energy and Net Zero will become a strategic as well as an environmental imperative. If that reduces the unreconstructed Russian economy to penury, so much the better. In the meantime, in one of the more perverse outcomes of Russian aggression, Vladimir Putin might have joined Greta Thunberg in the Green pantheon.

Finally, at least for now, it is clear that Britain has the wrong military strategy and the wrong armed forces. The Integrated Review published last year established a maritime national strategy based around the Queen Elizabeth class of aircraft carriers, a replacement nuclear deterrent, a loosely defined concept of Global Britain and, latterly, the AUKUS compact. The geographical focus is the Indo/Pacific region and it is entirely appropriate to fight the war after next, against China. Unfortunately, events have intervened and Europe is confronted with a military challenge that is proximate and land based at a time when the British army is at an historic nadir, under-manned, under-gunned and with no clear sense of its own utility.

This is not intended as gratuitous criticism. The authors of the Integrated Review made a decent fist of reconciling global political ambition with military capability and the maritime component is a necessary but now insufficient solution to national strategy. A return to the drawing board along with a renaissance of air/land capability is imperative.

We are days into what might be a long war. At this stage, the observations above are bound to be provisional and perhaps ephemeral. What does seem clear though is that Russia has embarked on a reckless course of action that may yet bring something that resembles military victory (though that remains uncertain), but that ends in political failure. Above all at this preliminary audit, the equation of Russian strategic gain taken against strategic sacrifice seems completely out of whack. That might be the most dangerous outcome of all.

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