That’s the question asked by David Sacks’s post at Responsible Statecraft. Here’s a synopsis:
The narrative dam our media has built around the reality in Ukraine is apparently breaking wide open, and the truth is finally spilling out:
- Ukraine’s war aims are unrealistic.
- Staggering casualties have decimated the Ukrainian army.
- Conscription policies are draconian.
- Morale is collapsing.
- Corruption is uncontrollable.
Most of these bullet points are observations I’ve been making right along. I make them because they are true.
I absolutely think that Russia was wrong to invade Ukraine. I would like for Ukrainians to be able to live in freedom in Ukraine. That’s not the direction in which things are moving.
If you’re looking or a metric for how serious President Biden is about supporting Ukraine, don’t look at his appropriations requests—those are funny money. Look at his emphasis on reindustrializing the United States. I wish I had saved it but not long ago I saw a table quantifying Ukraine’s use of various munitions and our present ability to produce them. There was a stark mismatch. We can’t produce enough munitions for Ukraine to prevail on field of battle without a major change in the U. S. economy in the direction of much more fundamental production.
And that’s just Ukraine. Add Israel and the possibility of more hotspots around the world and how poorly we are prepared becomes increasingly obvious.
These are both long, but well worth a read.
Not to toot my own horn, but align with what I’ve been saying for a while, which is that neither side has the offensive capability to win.
And it shows what modern warfare is like without air supremacy. There are a lot of lessons here the US needs to learn.
https://archive.ph/a3VWk
https://archive.ph/FMTEw
The key point, only hinted at in the first article, is that U. S. interests are not aligned with Ukraine’s.
My only remark to Gen. Zaluzhny’s plan is to quote Gen.. Mattis’s quote, the enemy gets a vote. His plan will work fine as long as Russia doesn’t react to it. In some sense that’s the message of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine: in a war of attrition Russia has the advantage. All it needs to do is not lose. I don’t say that because I want the Russians to win. I say it because I want there to be some Ukrainians left alive.
BTW I couldn’t reach those links with Chrome but I could With Opera.