Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, the man who led the planning and execution of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 (among other things) was quoted as saying that “Errors in tactics can be corrected in the next battle, but errors in strategy can only be corrected in the next war.”
His point, accurate then and accurate now, was that if one gets wrong the fundamentals of a given war, it is nearly impossible to correct them; you are too far behind to catch up. That said, Ukraine is a lesson in strategic mistakes – made by all sides.
To begin, Ukraine has the simple and horrible problem of geography. Strictly speaking, it’s not a strategic mistake as much as it is just an uncomfortable fact. If you wander through history you will find that countries without hard borders – a nasty mountain range, a raging river, perhaps an ocean – always have troubles with neighbors. It seems that wherever (and whenever) there are poorly defined borders, each side tends to interpret the border differently. It’s not just Ukraine: the French – German border, the German – Poland border, the Poland – Ukraine border, the Lithuania – Poland border, the Lithuania – Ukraine border, virtually every Russian border, the China – India border, they are all questioned and fought over regularly. As an example, take a look at France’s 500 year struggle to make hard borders, an effort that seems to have been fairly successful – since the end of World War II… Will it be questioned again in the next 100 years? In fact, strategists of the last two centuries have repeatedly noted that the plains of northern Europe, from the Bay of Biscay to the Urals, really offer no meaningful geographic barrier to a determined army. And the changes in the maps through the centuries reflect that fact.
So, from the geographic perspective, there is no easy, long-term solution for Ukraine; they will always need to be vigilant and armed up if they want to preserve their independence. And while they may insist that their borders are crystal clear, in fact, there are a lot of folks who have different opinions. And some of them are allies.
But there is more. The deal that was made in the 1990s – the Budapest Memorandum (signed in December of 1994) created a strategic fiction. The memorandum, really three letters, directed at Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, signed by Russia, the UK and the US, provided for the three former Soviet states to give up their nuclear forces and in return their sovereignty would be guaranteed by Russia, the UK and the US, and they wouldn’t be threatened.
Thing is, if everyone is, in fact, going to be non-threatening, and everyone is going to play nice with the other kids, there will be no problems and there need be no treaties or alliances, etc. But if someone decides to start throwing punches, the piece of paper is worth very little indeed unless there is both a credible deterrent and a willingness to use it.
So, Ukraine gave up more than 1,600 nuclear weapons. (It’s true that they did not have the codes for the permissive authorization link (the “PAL”), but they had engineers and they had the weapons. They could have been taken them apart and reassembled them without PAL.) Ukraine went from the 3rd largest nuclear power to a non-nuclear power. Love them or hate them, nothing says independence like your own nuclear arsenal, particularly one as large as Ukraine’s was (176 x ICBMs with 1240 warheads, 33 bombers and 416 nuclear bombs, for a total force of 1,656 nuclear weapons). As John Mearsheimer pointed out in an article in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993, World War I and World War II, fought essentially with conventional weapons (except for the last month of WWII), had resulted in more than 75 million deaths. Since the end of WWII wars in Europe had, in the shadow of nuclear deterrence, over a period of 48 years, resulted in fewer than 20,000 deaths. Nuclear deterrence was working. Ukraine giving up nuclear weapons was thus running a tremendous strategic risk…
But there is more to this strategic mistake.
Any decent planning staff, if asked in 1993 what might the US do to preserve Ukrainian independence from a recalcitrant Russia, would have made a case for just how hard that would be. It’s one thing to promise to play nice with the other kids. But what happens if someone becomes a bully? Is there a viable plan that doesn’t run great risk? And come with huge costs? President Clinton, who signed the memorandum for the US, commented in April of 2023 that “he felt terrible” about the agreement and regrets pressuring Ukraine to agree to the memorandum. Thank you, Mr. President, for the strategic hindsight.
A decent planning staff, and a more rational Chief Executive, might have decided then, in early 1994, to not press with the memorandum. And we would have no war in Ukraine right now.
Russia, too had a substantive strategic failure at the start of the war, first with the acceptance of a truly sophomoric net assessment that Ukraine would crumble like a house of cards, and then an inability to flex from a plan for a nearly peaceful occupation to one of stiff resistance. The cost has been egregious.
But, it is of note that Russia is large enough, relative to Ukraine, that it can absorb this substantive mistake and reframe the war, changing strategy in mid-stream. It has not been elegant, but they seem to have adapted and their ground campaign has moved forward.
It is also of note that the Russian maritime strategy has seemingly not improved much since Admiral Rozhestvensky. I think every dollar Ukraine spends on sinking Russian ships is a waste as the Russian Navy’s contribution to this war has been reduced to farce. But, perhaps Kiev is getting a good laugh out of it.
Continuing, Ukraine, after the tactical and operational successes of the first year, failed to capitalize on these successes. It is, of course, dependent on what the real losses are, but it is worth noting that in 2021 major international organizations such the International Monetary Fund (IMF), held the Ukrainian population as 43 million, though at least several million were probably already in Western Europe or Poland. As of several months ago, the IMF held the Ukrainian population as 34 million. Some suggest that number is high. Further, Ukraine has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Said differently, a long war is not helping Ukraine in any sense.
Now, it is true that every war is winnable. But, of course, the reverse is true, every war can be lost. It all depends on how much you are willing to spend – in manpower and in national wealth. Someplace, somewhere, the planners need to look at what the real cost would be to win the war per Kiev’s terms: forcing the Russians out of every piece of terrain of Ukraine as defined in 1991. If that price is acceptable, okay. But it is worth noting that that is not a decision for presidents and prime ministers, and certainly not for generals and bureaucrats, that is a decision for legislatures. We live in republics, not dictatorships. And as the US is footing perhaps half the total bill here, the decision to spend that much is a decision that must be made by Congress, with a clear understanding of the strategic risks we now run in the wake of a series of strategic mistakes. We can’t keep making strategic mistakes and come out unscathed.
And beyond the cost of the war itself, the opportunity cost of this war – to the US – is tremendous. An extra $50 billion or more per year spent on US weapons stockpiles and on readiness, to include ship repair, would have a tremendous deterrent effect in east Asia. That deterrent is now seriously weakened, all part of a strategic mistake whose full cost we won’t know for years.
Further, the war in Ukraine has already cost roughly one-hundred thousand Ukrainian lives (perhaps many more), and at least several hundred billion dollars. It has also resulted in perhaps a trillion dollars in damage to Ukraine as a whole. And the dead keep piling up, and the costs keep growing. It has knocked political stability around the world into a cocked hat, and we have growing concerns about where the next war might begin, as US and European powers find the cost of this war as further limiting their flexibility elsewhere in the world.
Finally, it has sent a clear and unmistakable signal to any country that is counting on allies coming to their rescue, that nuclear weapons are better than promises. How’s that for a strategic cost that the US will have to pay for some time in the future?
This is a direct result of a series of tremendous strategic mistakes, several of them 30 years old. One hopes we can learn from it… But if history is any guide, we won’t.
