Overall I agree completely with the several posts you’ve made since the snip I quote here. As to this one narrow point …
The Russians did / do use some of their own drones. Most of what they have / had are reconnaissance types not armed reusable drones nor suicidal drones that should really be renamed something closer to “slow flying munitions”. “Drone” has become too much of a catch-all term, and that’s across the whole military-industrial commentariat, not just you.
They have been launching and therefore expending large numbers of Iranian-built slow flying munitions. And are expected to continue doing so. These are excellent harassment munitions; rather cheap, not highly accurate nor highly destructive, longer ranged than most artillery and easy to launch.
Whether it makes sense for Russia to set up licensed production facilities in their own country or merely keep buying Iranian goods depends on a whole bunch of sub rosa factors in their “special relationship” as the two greatest outlaw pariah states by size & volume of external mischief.
It is convenient for the West that Iran & Russia do not share a land border where overt shipments of arms could be done without any possible outside interference.
The land route through Azerbaijan & Georgia is not real viable; Georgia is pretty solidly on the Ukrainian side although there have been issues a couple years ago where smuggling was going on through Georgia with the apparent connivance of at least some faction of the Georgia government & security apparatus.
The other land route through Turkmenistan & Kazakhstanis much more viable in terms of politics, security, and general lawlessness, if a lot longer.
The Russians use both reconnaissance and attack drones besides the ones bartered with Iran. The Lancet loitering drone has been a thorn in the side of the Ukrainian forces.
Good one about Caspian sea shipping. Sea transport is actually the best route for most munitions anyhow; rather heavy and not too much money per ton. A few ships can move more than a vast convoy of trucks with far less manpower or opportunity for “shrinkage”.
If this was true, why didn’t Putin institute a draft?
The fact is, Putin came to have the degree of power and influence in Russian society that he currently enjoys by depoliticizing the population of Russia. That took a lot of time and effort, and it means that one of the only real threats to Putin is a popular upswelling of opposition to his rule. And there’s very little that triggers a political awakening like getting drafted, or having your sons and brothers die in a foreign land during an expansionist war.
Putin has gone to a lot of trouble to avoid mobilization. That’s because he views mobilization as something that would be extremely costly to his regime. Whether the root cause is a concern for the life and dignity of Private Conscriptovich or fear of what said private’s family might do if their son’s death causes them to start paying attention to politics is, frankly, irrelevant. The point is that either way Putin cannot throw away Russian lives forever, and he seems to know this.
I think the big difference between Russia and Ukraine, with regards to drones and other clever uses of technology, is the military culture. If a Ukrainian citizen tells the military “I have a great idea for how I can help out, using equipment I already have lying around”, the military will say “Great, let’s see what it can do, so we can incorporate it into our plans”. If a Russian citizen tells the military the same thing, the Russian military’s response will be “You want to help out? Great, go charge that defensive emplacement, and if you’re lucky we’ll give you a rifle to do it with”. The centralized, top-down Russian military has no room for innovations that come from anywhere but the top.
Exactly. Culture matters a lot. Russian military culture is paranoid, corrupt, and top-down. No one is going to offer to fly drones for the military because either it will fail in which case you will be blamed, or it will succeed, in which case you are a threat to the power and control of pther generals. There is nothing in it for the innovator.
That said, Russia flies lots of drones. You probably don’t hear about it much because of wartime censorship in Ukraine which amplifies every Ukrainian drone kill and suppresses information about Russian successes or innovations.
Modnote: Quoting out of context like this is discouraged strongly. You’re making it look like LSLGuy said what he was quoting. Please do not do this again.
I’m afraid you’ve mistaken my meaning. I could have worded it better. I wasn’t saying that to pin it on LSLGuy personally. (Even if in context he appeared to somewhat agree with it, that’s beside the point.) I was expressing astonishment that anybody on the Allied side had characterized Morgenthau in those terms. It struck me as a pretty strange thing to say.
No harm here IMO. I understand Johanna’s point and motivation and have no objection, net of the various clarifications. But thanks to the staff for clearing the air.
@ Johanna: Morganthau was hell-bent on some combination of aggressive revenge and “never again”. Not unreasonably so from his personal position.
But as a matter of government policy for the government he represented (the USA) that would have been counterproductive to the US’s interests in preventing WW-III. The US foreign policy leadership had finally recognized that the post WW-I Versailles settlement had totally created the environment in which WW-II became all but inevitable. They did not want to play the same game again soon, but this time with nukes.
The UK would have had a large hand in implementing Morganthau’s plan and also, to their credit, recognized it for the poisoned chalice of cyclical revenge and counter-revenge that it represented.
Bottom line IMO: Morganthau was a gifted stateman who at one point in his career decided to drive looking mostly in his rear view mirror, not looking ahead. Understandable, and perhaps even excusable given the provocations he faced. But wrong nevertheless. We in 2023 are fortunate that cooler heads prevailed.
So back to the OP … Biden’s current take is NATO membership for Ukraine only after the war is over.
So if so then no NATO troops there while war is in progress.
To some degree this incentivizes Russia to continue to fight doesn’t it? Once they stop NATO includes Ukraine. Continuing the conflict avoids that outcome, in itself a goal.
What is the path to ending the war? Or does it continue as an endurance event draining resources from both the West and from Russia and lives from Russia and Ukraine until the West or Russia fatigues?
I think that’s the likeliest outcome. Not the only one - an outright battlefield victory is always possible or more likely a favorable regime change in Moscow (an “unfavorable” one could also happen with an even more stubborn ultranationalist in charge). But I’ve long suspected that this will end up being a grinding war of attrition, dragging on until economic/military exhaustion compels some settlement. What that looks like will probably depend on who blinks first.
If Ukraine joined NATO tomorrow, NATO troops (beyond the suddenly-NATO Ukrainian ones) would surely and immediately follow.
But lack of Ukrainian membership in NATO does not preclude NATO troops from fighting on Ukraine’s behalf at Ukraine’s request on Ukrainian soil. lack of membership makes it unlikely such a request would be granted by NATO, but doesn’t outright prohibit it.
And that is the situation we’ve had continuously from today back to before the 2014 Russia theft of Crimea.
Beyond that logic-puzzle quibble …
Russia, or at least Putin, had evidently never really thought through the outcomes if his invasion went badly.
At this point he/they’d probably be happy with a “frozen conflict” producing misery for the locals and distraction, refugee flows, and general cost and economic disruption for the Ukrainian and other Western governments.
Ultimately, Putin hopes to out-wait political events in the USA and/or Ukrainian battle fatigue and/or Western donor fatigue. Eventually his slow meatgrinder won’t be newsworthy anymore, much as the war in Syria, although still raging, is not much seen in Western news today.
The US / EU / NATO strategy, such as it is, is to avoid succumbing to that fatigue until after Russia has a change of leadership or a change of direction. Without pushing so hard that Russia / Putin is tempted to go out in a suicidal blaze of nuclear glory.
Like most wars, winning the battle is the easy part; conversely, managing the death throes of the adversary government and the immediate aftermath of an ungoverned and largely destroyed place full of traumatized hostile people that are the hard part. Cf. post-Saddam Iraq.
Well it is an ongoing expense of resources, human of just young men, human in terms of educated young leaving, and “treasure” for Russia even more.
Perhaps they get stuck in a sunk cost fallacy?
And what best serves China’s perceived interests?
Having the West and Russia relatively exhaust themselves? That certainly could result in West with less appetite for containing China’s regional aspirations and a Russia minimally beholden and dependent.
Or is the risk of a Russia excessively weakened to instability and therefore less predictability in their beholden junior partner becoming vassal state by that process perceived as against their interests?
Putin is stuck in the dictator’s equivalent of the sunk cost fallacy. Which is “Since I am advertised as infallible, I cannot change my mind without undermining that infallibility. Upon which my power rests.”
A rational Putin replacement might be able to avoid the sunk cost fallacy with enough dialog with a newly liberated public free from thought police. The more likely contenders to climb to the top of the bloody pole in the post-Putin Kremlin will be very much more likely to double-down in Ukraine unless things there are far more dire for Russia than they are today. Said another way, most experts think that regime change by whatever mechanism is a necessary condition for winding down the war. But it far from a sufficient condition and the next regime may well be worse than what we’re dealing with now.
The current foreign policy punditocracy on China-Russia is scattered, but a consensus view might be that China is pleased to be the friend of last resort for Russia, and is pleased to watch the West exhaust itself. China needs raw materials and Russia needs Chinese goods; the bilateral economics are favorably straightforward.
China realizes Russia is in freefall. They also know that, conveniently, their common border is all but uninhabited on the Russian side. So the ability of even a fully failed Russian state to export problems into China is small and readily containable if it comes to that.
Russia may become a Chinese vassal, much as Belarus is to Russia. But the Chinese can play a long game. Further, China understands much better than the West does how to operate as one totalitarian kleptocracy to another. Control a few key players in Russia then Russia’s national interest becomes whatever is best for those few key cronies. Who are quite willing to sell their countrymen, and their country, down the river for enough billions of rubles.
“Sunk cost fallacy” avoidance in this case is the likely forward costs vs benefits, ignoring how much is already lost but not retrievable.
Yes loss of face is a big cost that would factor in. Most for Putin. Ending the conflict without enough to be able to declare the loss a victory, hard to do if Ukraine quickly joins NATO, is a big cost to him. Better to lose lots more human and economic resources.
But a new person, even an ultra nationalist more dictatorial than he is, doesn’t have to bear that degree of personal face loss cost. They can just look at reasonably possible benefits and costs of continued conflict.
OTOH leaving in response to NATO forces engaging? The message sent by that is too big a cost.
I’m not convinced about what China perceives as its best interest though. An unstable collapsing nuclear power ruled by dictator to be determined or on going up for grabs may not be an imminent risk of exporting problems into China cross border, but the problems it potentially creates disrupts the world economy therefore China’s growth and influence.
NATO has a policy to not admit any country that is in an active conflict.
The reason they have that is because the country could join, immediately invoke article 5, and demand that NATO join the war.
Bringing Ukraine into NATO during the conflict is effectively equivalent to NATO declaring war on Russia. It would be a terrible move, and I don’t believe it will happen. WWIII leads that way.