I’m having considerable difficulty understanding the point of David Petraeus’s and Clara Kaluderovic’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. There’s a strong opening paragraph:
Ukraine is conducting a campaign with few precedents in military history. It isn’t merely defending its front lines or carrying out occasional deep strikes. It is imposing persistent strategic pressure on a much larger adversary by attacking Russia’s front lines, air defenses, fuel depots, logistics and military infrastructure and by trying to isolate occupied Crimea.
which they immediately follow by calling the effectiveness of the “strategic pressure” into question:
Ukraine almost certainly can’t destroy Russia’s war machine, but if it can keep enough of that machine disrupted, degraded and short on fuel, it can change the strategic equation.
The difficulty is that disruption is an operational concept; victory is a political one. As Clausewitz argued two centuries ago, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Military operations matter because they change the political relationship among the people, the government, and the armed forces. Petraeus and Kaluderovic never explain how Ukraine’s campaign of disruption produces that political result.
This claim is interesting:
History suggests that Ukraine’s strategy will give it the upper hand. The Allied oil campaign against Germany showed that modern armies can’t fight without fuel. The U.S. submarine campaign against Japan showed that a country can be strangled by attacking its logistics and supply lines. The Battle of the Atlantic showed that victory often goes to the side that adapts faster. Ukraine is combining elements of all three—cutting off Russia’s energy, targeting its supplies and adapting faster—while using a 21st-century tool kit.
Is that in fact what the history suggests? Those campaigns were enormously important, but they were conducted as part of a strategy aimed at the enemy’s complete defeat. The Allied objective was not merely to impose continuing costs but to eliminate the enemy’s capacity and ultimately its willingness—to continue the war. Indeed, Japan’s willingness to continue fighting long after its fuel reserves and industrial capacity had largely collapsed suggests that logistics alone do not necessarily produce political surrender.
That is not to say that the actions of Ukraine are completely irrelevant; they aren’t. They’re damaging to the Russians. But will they alter the strategic landscape sufficiently to secure victory for Ukraine? I’m skeptical.
Gen. Petraeus and Ms. Kaluderovic themselves acknowledge the limitations:
Despite its achievements, Ukraine hasn’t solved every problem. Russia continues to strike Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, and the front remains brutal. Moscow is exploiting Ukraine’s shortage of missile-defense systems and interceptors, and the introduction of jet-powered Shahed drones may pose a new challenge for Ukraine’s largely piston-driven drone interceptors.
I think the lesson is somewhat different and it is illustrated by both Ukraine and Iran. Precision weapons, inexpensive drones, and dispersed manufacturing have lowered the cost of continued resistance. A state that could once have been rendered militarily helpless can now continue imposing costs on its opponent for a very long time. That certainly changes the strategic equation but not necessarily in a benign way and not necessarily in a way that produces decisive victory.
