Was reading through a brief article today on NATO pressing South Korea to provide arms to Ukraine in its fight against Russia (https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-nato-urges-south-korea-participation-be006936069bfed0ec4b39491754b333). South Korea? Really??
I mean you can kind of get to the idea of a direct threat to the United States by Russia given its near peer status on the world stage, aggression in Eastern Europe, Syria, Libya, ties with China, general kleptocratic nature, assassinations, Putin’s stated desire to recreate not the USSR but Russia of the mid 19th century, etc. You can make an even greater case as to Russia’s threats to European NATO and prior Russian states like Estonia, Latia, Lithuania, Ukraine, etc. as well as those states in its sphere of influence but tangentially independent (Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova, etc.) But South Korea? You have to go pretty far to get to a direct threat by Russia to South Korean interests.
So you have all of Europe including the Nordics, Iberia, and much of Eastern Europe as well as the US, Canada, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Israel and others assisting Ukraine militarily and economically. While not a full blown World War…it is a “world war” in all other sense. With other major players (China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Nigeria, South Africa, Saudi, etc.) largely staying out of it for now, why are we (the US specifically) so concerned with trying to defeat or degrade Russia’s military forces with what appears to be the least amount of blood and treasure (except money—that we can print in endless supply)?
Its not to defeat Russia or to dethrone Putin.
I came to that realization in reading this article here: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/usaf-general-warns-of-war-with-china-over-taiwan-in-2025
And the real importance of the fight is not being done at the forefront of the minds of those actually pushing Ukraine…you think Biden, Pelosi or the other political apparatchiks in DC know what they are doing? Not hardly. Nor do I think that Miley or Austin have a clue what they are doing. All are too busy figuring out which face diaper to wear and what self flagellating training courses they are going to require of our forces while degrading our military’s ability to be an effective killing machine.
No, the true reason why the conflict takes on the importance it does (drawing in global parties) and requiring a defeat/degradation of Russia is that it would eliminate the prospect of a two front war in the coming and inevitable confrontation with China. Make no mistake, Russia has a plethora or aged men, material, ammo, equipment, etc. but at its heart its Iraq circa 1991 on steroids. A bloated armed force used to getting its way out of its sheer bulk rather than combat effectiveness. Without a centime of modern airpower, artillery, tanks, or virtually heavy weaponry of any kind, Ukraine’s small infantry, small arms based units have obliterated any pretense to Russia as a military power. Now, they still have thousands of men and decrepit tanks and gear they can throw at the battle, and probably will, but every day that goes by, they get weaker, using reserves they can’t afford to lose.
With this in mind, we turn to China…they are growing by leaps and bounds in traditional capabilities—churning out ships at a rate not seen since the US industrialization of WWII, developing near-peer equivalent airframes (though without the engines or pilots the West has), burrowing themselves into Africa and the Pacific islands, mass producing missile salvos and sustaining the largest manned army on earth. They still aren’t quite at the point where they could defeat the US and West 1V1 in a straight up confrontation but they aren’t far either. Advances in AI, quantum computing, drones and other asymmetric efforts could well bring the balance of power even closer.
The West could NOT successfully take on Russia in Eastern Europe and China in the Pacific at the same time and the most important people (Xi, Putin, some at the CIA, some in Congress, some in the military) know this. This is the true nature of the threat posed by Putin. If the West has to tie itself down to supplying mass quantities of arms and men to keep Russia from rolling its arms across its former territories as it has been doing for the past decade and a half in a more slow roll approach, it could never simultaneously take on China’s impending Taiwan takeover, it would fold without a whimper. China isn’t ready to take on the US as of today, its still ramping up production to the point where it wants to be—which is where it was in Korea and Russia during WWII, able to simply overwhelm opposing forces in sheer number-their ships and planes don’t have to be as good as ours…not nearly so, they can just mass produce them at a scale unheard of, but they aren’t there quite yet.
In a few years though? Those air incursions over Taiwan aren’t being done for fun. Preparations for the most difficult operation in any military’s handbook (an amphibious landing against a contested shore) are well underway in China. While China can fill the sea with ships and land thousands of men on Taiwan’s shores…it remains extremely vulnerable to submarine incursions/attack as well as air based counterattacks. The US won’t be sending its carrier fleets in range of China’s land based anti-ship capabilities, but is more than capable of deploying an aircap over the entire Pacific that China can’t match—opening its supply, transport, and any other water based craft required for the invasion at extreme risk…Then if China holds a beachhead? US air and seapower will get an even greater fixed target list incurring a price even China may not wish to pay.
So where does that leave us? Unfortunately, as much as it might be nice to stay out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and make the Libertarians out there happy (who have never acknowledged that violence and strategic thinking is required if one is going to exist in a violent world—which I always find weird for a group that always claims to want critical/advanced thinking) it would leave the West and specifically the US grossly out of options when it comes to fighting wars on two sides of the planet. For all the yammering coming out of the “generals” and “admirals” in Washington, the US does not anymore possess a true five ocean navy or any capability to fight two major wars at the same time, as is given lip service to in their doctrine.
It must seek to limit what forces are required to contest a peer state to a single theater. It has lots of shiny toys…some of the best toys ever created for the destruction of an opposing force…but the supply of them is limited, its government coffers dwindled, its people indebted, its culture stuck in perpetual adolescence and navel gazing.
So why not throw everything we have (F-35s, full tank divisions, high end ballistics, etc.) against the Russians and defeat them quickly to prepare for China? Wouldn’t it then benefit us to get the Russian conflict over ASAP? Its a very delicate line we are playing with Russia. Here the Libertarians and peaceniks are right. Embattling a nuclear power who still possesses mass reserves of all kinds (note Russia’s submarines have stayed out of it, as has a significant portion of their high end aircraft) and a penchant for asymmetric violence is not something to be taken lightly. Walking that line of supplying Ukraine with sufficient armament to degrade and defeat Russia while not tipping them into full psychotic killers of world ending catastrophes is a difficult proposition. We don’t want to have to expend limited and valuable resources there. Every F-35, or Abrams, or tomahawk lost/expended there is one less for use in the South Pacific (yes, I know the Abrams is highly unlikely to show up in that conflict due to its nature—you get the point). If anything, use of those resources there may accelerate the China conflict as we’d have shown our hand in terms of what side of the globe we were willing to take the gloves off for. China knows our limitations just as much as some of us do.
There is a saying that propagates throughout certain corners of right wing commentary every time a rainbow flag is pushed by the US military, standards reduced, fleet or air wing downsized, project “contested” by lawyers of a competing company, our best soldiers pushed out due to politicization, or CRT theory taught over marksmenship…
“We are going to lose a major war”
That most certainly is true if we fail to defeat Russia before China makes its move. The clock ticks both ways. Which chimes first?