At War on the Rocks Mike Pietrucha makes a pretty good case that sending F-16s to Ukraine is at best a distraction:

The foundation of an airpower capability is fundamentally people, not hardware. An aircraft, of whatever type, does not grant a capability unless it is flown by capable and trained individuals, competently maintained, and adequately supported. Ukraine’s air force is not a fledgling air force; it operates fixed and rotary wing aircraft that perform airlift, counterair, and ground attack missions. It has a 30-year history of using and modifying legacy Soviet aircraft, and Ukraine has its own aviation industry. Ukraine has managed to maintain a force despite horrific losses in the early days, and has even managed to add new defense-suppression capabilities, enabled by MiG-29 Fulcrum carrying American-supplied AGM-88 High Speed Antiradiation Missiles. But it does not operate Western aircraft and it never has. By necessity, its training programs, tools, support equipment, and experience base are entirely based on three decades of independent operations with Soviet legacy aircraft, which were designed to support a Soviet style of airpower employment, not a Western one. The Soviets operated their airpower under centralized control, primarily in support of the ground component, while Western airpower embraces aviator initiative and utilizes airpower for a wide range of missions beyond just flying artillery.

Switching over to Western aircraft is possible, of course, and Ukraine is an excellent candidate for doing so. But the provision of Western fighters like the F-16 is not an evolutionary step; it is a revolutionary step that will require the Ukrainian air force to start from scratch. Ukraine has experience operating single-mission aircraft — their interceptors like the MiG-29 Fulcrum have only a rudimentary ground attack capability, and their Su-24 Fencer and Su-25 Frogfoot ground attack aircraft have no air to air capability at all. The F-16 has evolved into a capable multirole fighter that has no parallel in the ex-Soviet aviation enterprise.

All it would take is time and the people to train to fly and maintain the craft. Sounds to me like procuring old Soviet aircraft would actually be a better choice.

Not everyone sees President Biden’s visit to Kyiv as a triumphant affirmation of Ukraine’s heroic defense. Here are Harry Kazanias’s remarks at 1945:

The problem for Joe Biden is people are now actually going to start asking real questions about U.S. policy when it comes to the Ukraine war. You don’t need a Ph.D. from Princeton to dream them up: what are our goals in Ukraine, how do we plan to achieve them, and what we are willing to risk to reach them?

And believe me, those are never questions any president wants to answer when it comes to matters abroad.

and

There is no end game, just to make sure there is no media outrage that we aren’t helping Ukraine. You know, Biden has to worry about 2024 and keeping his poll numbers from not slipping any more than they have.

In all honesty I think it’s probably both. I think he was right to provide support for Kyiv. I think we should be more hesitant about supporting Kyiv’s full war goals. Neither I nor anyone who actually knows anything about Russia thinks that Moscow is bluffing when it holds us Russian control of Crimea as a non-negotiable national interest. I’m not as confident about Russia’s view of Ukraine exiting the Russian sphere of influence. Some knowledgeable people seem to think that would be an acceptable outcome for Russia. I think it’s an inevitable one.

If it’s not an acceptable outcome, the Ukrainians, Russians, and we are in for a very bad time of it.

You might find this post by Blake Stilwell at Military.com entertaining. As it turns out the Air Force combined the power of more than a thousand Playstations to create one of the fastest supercomputers in the world:

When the PlayStation 2 was first released to the public, it was said the computer inside was so powerful, it could be used to launch nuclear weapons. It was a stunning comparison. In response, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein opted to try and buy up thousands of the gaming consoles, so many that the U.S. government had to impose export restrictions.

But it seems Saddam gave the Air Force an idea: building a supercomputer from many PlayStations.

Just 10 years after Saddam tried to take over the world using thousands of gaming consoles, the United States Air Force took over the role of mad computer scientist and created the world’s 33rd-fastest computer inside its own Air Force Research Laboratory.

Only instead of PlayStation 2, the Air Force used 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 consoles. They called it the “Condor Cluster,” and it was the Department of Defense’s fastest computer.

Read the whole thing. The experiment, although successful, did not end happily. Sony shut them down.

I also wanted to bring George Friedman’s observations on what happens if Ukraine falls to your attention. He notes:

If the Ukrainians can no longer resist effectively, and if the flanks represented by Belarus and Moldova are opening a path to Poland and Romania, what will the United States do? Europe will follow Washington’s lead, for better or worse. The worst-case scenario, of course, would be the war that was avoided during the Cold War. That war never happened because Russia did not have the power to engage and defeat NATO and its U.S. benefactors. The Russians were not prepared to attack given the risk of failure and the riskier, albeit unlikely, possibility of a nuclear exchange.

Still, the U.S. must consider the risks of intervention. If Russia occupies Ukraine, it would effectively border Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.

The big question is whether Russia would then invade any of those countries. I don’t think so but I’ve been wrong before. It’s certainly a risk.

Aiding the Ukrainians in recovering all of there erstwhile territory including Crimea is also a risk. Weighing the relative risks is something I’m glad I don’t have to do. I wish no one had to do it.

I wanted to bring Brandon J. Weichert’s remarks about Russia’s view of Crimea at Asia Times to your attention. After a lengthy review of the history and context he observes:

For Russia, Crimea is not negotiable, not when one of its only two warm-water ports is in danger. The Americans know this. Yet Washington refuses to rein in its Ukrainian clients, who are banging the drum to launch a massive attack against Crimea. (It almost makes you wonder if that was the purpose of all the money that President Joe Biden’s son Hunter received while serving as a non-expert in natural gas for a Ukrainian oil company.)

It is my belief that Ukraine understands fully that any offensive against the fortified Russian positions in Crimea will end in disaster for Kiev’s cause. Yet it insists on this move likely because it continues hoping to draw NATO (and specifically the Americans) into a direct engagement against Russia on Kiev’s behalf.

Whatever you think of Russia’s present invasion of Ukraine, its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was completely foreseeable and predictable and, from the Russians’ viewpoint, completely justified. I certainly don’t believe that Russia’s invasion a year ago was equally justified and, indeed, it surprised me.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Crimea is non-negotiable and that efforts to oust Russia from Crimea are treated as an existential threat by Russia.

Imagine my surprise when a piece by J. Duncan Moore, Jr. at The Nation titled “Nasty, Brutish, and Short—Chicago-Style” was not in fact about Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot but was about her tenure as mayor:

CHICAGO, ILL.—The mayor is female and an accomplished lawyer. She is Black, and gay, with a wife and child. And she is a progressive who beat the establishment when the odds were against her. For Democrats and left-leaning local politicians, what’s not to love?

Plenty, it turns out. Lori Lightfoot, elected Chicago mayor in 2019 with 73 percent of the vote and carrying all of the city’s 50 wards, is struggling in her campaign for reelection.

A poll published in early February showed Lightfoot locked in a dead heat with two challengers: Representative Jesus “Chuy” Garcia and former Chicago budget director and schools chief Paul Vallas. Asked whom they would vote for if the election were held tomorrow, 20 percent of likely voters said Garcia, 18 percent said Vallas—and only 17 percent said Lightfoot. The mayor won favorable marks from 22 percent of likely Chicago voters—and unfavorable marks from 54 percent. The city is on the wrong track, according to 71 percent of voters.

and

The question now is whether Lightfoot will make it to the runoff—or will Vallas and Garcia surge to the top two positions?

and

Chicago is an unhappy place right now. This presents a headwind to any incumbent office holder; indeed, a dozen city council members have chosen to bow out. Granted, big-city mayors around the country are in a tough spot. Yet that doesn’t capture just how aggravated the crisis in Chicago has become. It feels like decades of fiscal mismanagement and civic rot have curdled to a stinking mess of intractability.

The Loop has not recovered from the pandemic and the mayhem of the George Floyd protests. Office towers sit half empty, and the street-level restaurants, shops, and branch banks that serviced the daytime influx are gone. Huge marquee corporate headquarters—Boeing, Citadel, Caterpillar—have fled for more hospitable climes. Ridership on the L trains and buses is down and antisocial behavior is up, leading middle-class residents to avoid taking public transit. The once-mighty Chicago Tribune has shrunk to an afterthought in the civic conversation, and the exodus of Black families to Texas, Georgia, and Florida continues apace.

Fear of crime hangs over the citizenry like a gray pall. The gun violence that was once believed confined to specific neighborhoods has now spread to the rest of the city. Violent carjackings and street robberies are everywhere. (Citadel, in particular, cited Chicago street crime as a reason for its departure for… Miami.)

I suspect the outcome of the primary election will be that Vallas and Lightfoot will be the top two votegetters, respectively, largely because the percentage of Hispanic voters in Chicago is smaller than the percentage of Hispanics in Chicago. If that’s the case, Vallas is likely to win in the general election. I think that Mr. Moore is giving too much credit to Chuy Garcia. Although he may be right and Rep. Garcia will emerge as Chicago’s mayor.

I wanted to draw your attention to a New Yorker interview by David Remnick of historian Stephen Kotkin. I recommend you read the whole thing but Dr. Kotkin makes some very interesting points:

1. Contrary to what you might have read, Ukraine is winning on Twitter but Russia is winning on the battlefield.
2. Ukrainian valor plus Russian atrocities equals Western unity and resolve.

Here’s his epitome of the war:

Let’s think of a house. Let’s say that you own a house and it has ten rooms. And let’s say that I barge in and take two of those rooms away, and I wreck those rooms. And, from those two rooms, I’m wrecking your other eight rooms and you’re trying to beat me back. You’re trying to evict me from the two rooms. You push out a little corner, you push out another corner, maybe. But I’m still there and I’m still wrecking. And the thing is, you need your house. That’s where you live. It’s your house and you don’t have another. Me, I’ve got another house, and my other house has a thousand rooms. And, so, if I wreck your house, are you winning or am I winning?

What he proposes to conclude the war is for Ukraine to recognize that it’s lost Crimea and the eastern part of the country and that Ukraine be admitted to the European Union.

Both Ukraine and Russia have been very open about their objectives in the war. Ukraine’s are to recover its lost territory including Crimea and to join the European Union and NATO. Russia’s are to “protect” i.e. annex or at the very least detach from Ukraine the parts of Ukraine with majority ethnic Russian populations. Russia will retain Crimea. Ukraine will not become a member of either NATO or the EU. There is no compromise there.

What are the U. S. objectives? I recognize that our support of Ukraine is being sold as support for the rules-based international order but that rings hollow—you can’t support such an order without following it yourself. They can’t very well sell our support as “making the world safe for kleptocracy”. I think our objective is for Russia to lose.

If Ukraine joins the EU even NATO while Russia retains Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, does Russia lose? Does it preserve the rules-based international order? I should also mention that I believe that if the war ends and Ukraine is admitted to the EU, it is overwhelmingly likely that many, many more Ukrainians will move to other EU countries. Ukraine will in essence be hollowed out.

The Ukrainians win from such an arrangement, the Russians don’t lose, but we definitely lose. I can’t see our supporting such a resolution.

Update

Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s formula for concluding the war from Newsweek:

The winning formula for Ukraine is simple: Supplies of weapons, economic sanctions against Russia, helping to strengthen Ukraine’s resilience, the de-Putinization of Russia, and the accession of Ukraine to the European Union and NATO. Only all the elements of this formula combined would guarantee permanent security for Europe and the whole world.

which is obviously predicated on the assumption that there is some level of support by the West of Ukraine which will result in a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield. I don’t believe the numbers actually support that.

Real per pupil spending has tripled over that period.

The campaigning for the upcoming mayoral primaries in Chicago are drawing to a close. Eleven days from now. As I suggested in an earlier post, right now the battle lines are being drawn along racial lines. There is one white candidate, Paul Vallas, the plurality of whose support is from white voters; one Hispanic candidate, Chuy Garcia, the plurality of whose support is from Hispanic voters, and nine black candidates who divide the plurality of the black vote among themselves.

What a difference four years makes! In the last Chicago mayoral primary election, Lori Lightfoot received the plurality of her support from white voters and ultimately prevailed, largely because she wasn’t Toni Preckwinkle. Her performance as mayor has lost much of that support.

Right now she’s running TV spots, the gist of which is “if you want a black mayor, vote for me—I’m the only black candidate who can win!”. We’ll see if that’s a convincing message.

If no candidate wins the majority of the vote in the primaries, there will be a run-off between the two top finishing candidates in the primary. NBC News reports that a recent poll suggests that Mayor Lightfoot might not even make it to the general election:

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot finds herself bunched together in a crowded field ahead of this month’s mayoral race, raising the specter of her possibly missing out on the likely runoff.

The new poll sponsored by Northwestern University’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, as well as a handful of other non-profits, finds Lightfoot in third place with 14% support from registered Chicago voters (when those who say they are leaning one way are included).

That puts the incumbent mayor behind former Chicago Public Schools chief Paul Vallas (19%) and Democratic Rep. Chuy García (17%), and in front of businessman Willie Wilson (12%) and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson (9%), as well as others in the field. But 12% say they’re undecided (even after being pushed to pick the candidate they’re leaning toward supporting), and the poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.9%, which means the race is a jump ball.

Garcia is pulling support from 40% of Latino voters (the only other candidate in double digits is Vallas with support from 13%); Lightfoot is winning the plurality of Black voters (23%); and Vallas has support from the plurality of white voters (25%).

I honestly think that none of the candidates would make a particularly good mayor. Lightfoot is objectively the worst mayor in Chicago history. Vallas is a bland apparatchik. IMO Chuy Garcia is an empty suit. Brandon Johnson has the shortcoming of believing that every problem can be solved by throwing money at it. Willie Wilson has never held elective office—I’m afraid that the career pols and permanent bureaucracy will tie him up in knots.