The USA Does Not Understand War
Ukraine Taking A Position With Machines Not Soldiers Makes That Clearer Than Ever
Hi All,
The USA is facing a serious crisis in its analytical understanding of war. I thought it could not get any worse than it was in 2022, when practically everyone from the President on through the Pentagon, the IC and the think tank community judged that Ukraine would be conquered swiftly by some awesomely powerful Russian military machine. However, what we are continuing to see from the USG and the analytical community makes it apparent that things are no better and might be worse. Fundamental mistakes are being made continually, as we see in the present war with Iran.
However, maybe the greatest mistake of the last few years (which I will break down in much more detail below) has been in not understanding how the war between Ukraine and Russia was developing. What we have seen repeatedly is a desperation to hold onto past, failed notions of how US policy makers and analysts believed war should be fought. They first kept assuring us that tank-led assaults were the key to military success, even when tanks were getting massacred by their thousands by cheaper systems. Then they assured us that Ukraine really did not need ranged systems, F-16s, etc, etc, all of which, once deployed have turned out to be vital to Ukraine’s war effort.
While these were all bad, maybe the most catastrophic US error, one that had Ukraine listened to it could have led to Ukrainian defeat, was the widespread insistence that to deal with personnel shortages, Ukraine needed to draft its 18-24 year old males in mass and send them to the front. This was a widely spread narrative, from the top of the USG through the think-tank community. Indeed, it was regularly used to cast aspersions on Ukraine’s war strategy and even to try and press Ukraine into ceding more territory.
Well, thankfully Ukraine disagreed. It protected its younger population and instead invested heavily across society in drones, UGVs, and other unmanned systems to try and reduce the number of soldiers on the front and save their population. That effort is now paying massive dividends and the world is sitting up and taking notice. In the last week, the Ukrainians even seized a Russian position using machines alone, and more and more European leaders are talking about the war heading in Ukraine’s favor.
Quite why the US has failed repeatedly to understand war is one of the greatest questions/problems we face. Instinctively I believe that fighting a war is too easy for the US, but that means the US has lost the ability to distinguish between fighting and winning. At the same time, the US with its massive military machine, huge IC and inflated think-tank community, has confused being big with being smart. Actually too much of this groupings thinks it understands war because the US is so strong. This arrogance has led it to being probably the worst community for understanding war in analytical history.
To outline this problem I will talk a little about the Ukrainian machine-led assault, what it means, and then contrast it to what we were hearing, ad nauseum, from US sources over the last two years. The disconnect is jarring, but needs to be faced. If the US does not improve its understanding of war, it will continue to fail in the terrible ways that it has now for decades.
Ukraine And The War Today
A few days a notable event happened in the course of not just the Russo-Ukraine War but also in modern, machine-defined war. The Ukrainians assaulted and took a Russian position using only machines—both UAVs and UGVs (drones and pilotless land vehicles). Not a single Ukrainian soldier was put in harms way, while the Russians ended up losing humans, some of which were even filmed surrendering to the Ukrainian machines. Here is a screenshot from a video of a surrender incident which you can watch here.
