With the madness of the Cold War behind us, no one would again risk taking the world to the brink

Wednesday, March 9th, 2022

The problem with the idea of a no-fly zone is its enforcement:

Russian anti-aircraft batteries in Belarus and Russia easily cover all of Ukraine’s territory, and would shoot down allied planes at will. In order for a no-fly zone to be enforced, therefore, we would have to be ready to bomb military installations outside of Ukraine, and indeed on Russian soil. While acknowledging these dangers, Breedlove himself thinks that we should not take the threat of a no-fly zone off the table, presumably for strategic ambiguity reasons. As a bluff never carried through, it has some merits: the more Russia wonders about our final intentions, the better. But it’s worth carefully thinking through the consequences of actually taking the decision.

Once the United States starts losing planes over Ukraine, for example, the domestic pressure to get revenge will become orders of magnitude greater than it already is. Demands for punitive actions against Russian ground forces will become shriller, with calls to bomb troops in Ukraine as well as bases in Belarus or Russia. Besides a thirst for revenge, righteous indignation would also increase. After all, most of the horrors we are witnessing are the result of Russian artillery pounding an overmatched Ukrainian resistance and targeting helpless civilians in cities. Air power has its limits, however. Properly punishing Russian forces will at some point require deploying ground troops of our own. A no-fly zone could transform into a more ambitious land war for securing Ukrainian territory in no time, a land war that itself spills over into Belarus and Russia.

How bad could that be, though? Doesn’t the apparent sorry state of the Russian army mean that NATO would have little trouble in stopping Moscow’s murderous campaign fairly quickly?

[…]

While the United States was preoccupied fighting low-grade colonial wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan and building up its force posture to most effectively kill aggrieved shepherds with machine guns riding around in Toyota LandCruisers, Russia (and China) have been upgrading their tactical nuclear arsenal in preparation for exactly the kind of confrontation we see now in Ukraine.

Tactical nuclear weapons should be distinguished from strategic nuclear weapons. The former are of much lower yield and destructive power than the latter, and are designed to obliterate a tank battalion or a base rather than an entire city. Indeed, they were first developed by the United States in the Cold War in order to deter superior Soviet land forces from contemplating an invasion of a comparatively overmatched NATO army on the European continent. The idea was that if the Soviets rolled tanks into the Fulda Gap, for example, NATO could destroy them without triggering the ultimate escalation to Mutually Assured Destruction — a nuclear exchange targeting cities on both sides that would likely end human civilization as we know it.

The military strategist Elbridge Colby was among those warning in 2018 that American complacency on the question of tactical nukes was leading us to disaster. Liberals and doves were certain that with nuclear war now “unthinkable,” there was no point in investing in weapons that would skirt the threshold of total annihilation. It was part a failure of imagination, and part of a broader belief in rationalist “progress” — with the madness of the Cold War behind us, no one would again risk taking the world to the brink. A new day had dawned on the world with the fall of the Soviet Union. There was no going back to darkness.

Sadly, planners in Moscow were not as idealistic, or complacent. Willick cites a Congressional Research Service report, saying that “the United States has only 230 [tactical nuclear weapons], ‘with around 100 deployed with aircraft in Europe.’ Russia has up to 2,000.” Talmadge nails down the predicament we find ourselves in: “The problem is that precisely because all-out nuclear war would be so costly for both the U.S. and Russia, Mr. Putin likely believes it won’t happen. As a result, he may feel relatively safe engaging in conventional aggression or even limited nuclear use below that threshold — demonstration strikes, for example, or attacks on military targets — without much risk of a Western response.”

Compared to an intercontinental ballistic missile it is very slow, but possibly unstoppable

Wednesday, March 9th, 2022

Russia’s Poseidon is an Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedo:

It is a giant torpedo which can hit coastal cities with devastating results. Compared to an intercontinental ballistic missile it is very slow, but possibly unstoppable.

290A9C50-9514-4E36-8D42-DECCE3AF06C8

The weapon’s expected speed, around 70 knots, is fast enough to make it realistically uncatchable to existing torpedoes. And its operating depths, perhaps as deep as 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) puts it beyond reach. Western planners will have to develop new weapons to intercept it. And that will take considerable time and investment.

A nuclear reactor gives the weapon essentially unlimited range. This gives it new levels of operational flexibility in terms of launch and target locations. Although it is restricted to at-sea or coastal targets, such as New York, Los Angeles. It can be launched from under the protection of the ice cap, or from coastal waters.

He openly championed the need for a revolution in military affairs

Tuesday, March 8th, 2022

In The Kill Chain, Christian Brose describes a time when new secretary of defense had just taken office:

He openly championed the need for a revolution in military affairs. He created a new Office of Force Transformation in the Department of Defense to oversee the development of new military technologies and new ways of fighting. He signed a new defense strategy that directed the Pentagon to solve key operational problems that looked as if they had been lifted directly from Marshall’s 20XX wargame series — the focus not so much on the less-capable adversaries the United States had been contending with since 1991 but rather more so on emerging great powers with increasingly capable militaries. In other words, China.

But — in what ultimately proved unfortunate for the idea of a revolution in military affairs — that secretary’s name was Donald Rumsfeld, and nine months after taking office in 2001, America was attacked.

[…]

As in 1991, US forces operated from sanctuaries on the doorsteps of our opponents, who were powerless to stop us. We controlled the timing of when the wars were fought. We could operate with near impunity. We were technologically superior.

They would move to the cellar as indirect fire struck the top of the building or to higher floors when German Panzers approached

Monday, March 7th, 2022

John Spencer and Jayson Geroux of the Modern War Institute present an overview of defensive tactics from the modern history of urban warfare. Defenders can, for instance, create strongpoints by reinforcing buildings or using preexisting structures that are already hard to destroy:

In September 1942, during the Battle of Stalingrad, Russian Sergeant Yakov Pavlov and his platoon seized a four-story apartment building — later dubbed “Pavlov’s House” — overlooking a large square. The building had long lines of sight from three sides. Pavlov’s men place barbed wire and antipersonnel and antitank mines around the building, smashed and cut holes in walls to create interior walkways, and placed machine-gun firing points in the building’s corners. They would move to the cellar as indirect fire struck the top of the building or to higher floors when German Panzers approached so they could fire antitank rifles down onto the tanks’ vulnerable, thin roofs. Pavlov and his men held the building for fifty-eight days against numerous mechanized and combined arms attacks, causing an unknown number of German vehicle and soldier kills in the process.

Urban defenders can shape the terrain by rubbling buildings:

From September to December 1943 Wehrmacht engineers in Ortona, Italy extensively rubbled the buildings to support the German defense of the city. They blew down corners of houses, entire houses, or even lines of houses to create rubble piles up to fifteen feet high, which were then liberally sown with mines and booby traps. This rubble blocked narrower, ox cart–width secondary streets to force the attacking Canadians down the main thoroughfare and into the main German defensive area. It also made it nearly impossible for supporting tanks to climb over the piles or maneuver to support the dismounted infantry and engineers, and even blocked Canadian observation down the roads.

Modern cities often have existing concrete barriers:

ISIS fighters used concrete barriers such as T-walls left behind by coalition forces for their defense of the city of Mosul, Iraq in late 2016 and 2017. They used trucks and cranes to move and then pile the barriers on the outskirts of the city. The obstacle numbers and composition required the coalition to take ten-week training courses on combined arms breaching and then use an extensive amount of armored vehicles that included sixty up-armored bulldozers to breach the barriers themselves.

Large weapons can be disassembled and reassembled on the higher floor of a building to provide superior lines of sight and angles of fire:

At the Battle of Manila, Philippines in 1945, Japanese naval defense forces removed antiaircraft and naval guns from their destroyed ships in Manila Bay and put them in pillboxes and strongpoints across the city. At the Battle of Ortona, the German defenders disassembled two antitank guns and reassembled them on the second floors of two buildings in Piazza Plebiscito, allowing them to destroy two Sherman tanks when they entered the square. It took several hours for the Canadians to bring in more resources to eventually destroy these two antitank gun positions.

Urban defenders must now develop creative ways to hide obstacles, weapon systems, battle positions, and personnel from aerial observation:

Civilians in Aleppo, Syria strung forty-foot-high sheets between buildings to reduce sniper attacks while ISIS, as part of its defensive plan in 2017, also placed cloth, metal, or tarpaulins between buildings in Raqqa, Syria to stymie coalition aerial assets. These simple camouflage techniques are the urban operations equivalent of attaching trees and foliage to vehicles in wooded terrain.

Mouseholes — holes created in interior and exterior walls of buildings — allow soldiers to move while remaining hidden:

ISIS fighters in the 2017 Battle of Marawi in the Philippines used mouseholes and tunnels under and through houses to enable movement to and from battle positions and to move to alternate position if they were at risk of being overrun. The mouseholes and tunnels also allowed militants to escape massive aerial bombardments and maneuver against Philippine military forces, ultimately contributing to the amount of collateral damage required to retake the city. During the 1945 the Battle of Berlin, German soldiers proved adept at using the city’s extensive underground transportation, sewage, and other infrastructure networks. The tunnels were used to care for wounded, maintain lines of communication, shelter noncombatants, and conduct attacks. One Soviet commander, Marshal Ivan S. Koniev, recalled that the German forces’ “use of the underground structures caused a good deal of trouble….[German soldiers] emerg[ed] from the underground communications [and] fired on motor vehicles, tanks, and gun crews.”

The defense allows a force to pre-position ammunition, medical supplies, water, and rations:

The Germans at the Battle of Ortona had neatly stacked rifle magazines resting on windowsills, along with boxes of grenades and piles of antitank mines in pre-selected rooms, thus allowing them to be unconcerned about the burden of carrying all their required supplies with them as they fought and moved between positions. Japanese naval defense forces preparing for the attack of the US 6th Army at the Battle of Manila put caches in sewers to support their extensive network of battle positions.

The urban environment offers a multitude of large obstacles:

During a significant battle in Sadr City, Iraq on April 4, 2004, Mahdi militiamen and their sympathizers rapidly constructed hasty obstacles made of refrigerators, vehicle engine blocks and axles, rolls of concertina wire, wooden furniture, heaps of burning trash, and rotting meat that stopped American HMMWVs, infantry fighting vehicles, and at times even M1 Abrams tanks. At the 1950 Battle of Seoul, North Koreans made barricades of sandbags, vehicles, debris, and anything else they could get their hands on. The barricades were used to block roads, protect strongpoints, and establish an overall barricade defense system with some obstacles so strong it took UN forces days to clear them.

Antiarmor ambushes have had tremendous success in urban terrain:

During the 1994–95 First Battle of Grozny, Chechnya, Chechen separatists perfected the use of antiarmor ambushes against Russian conventional forces attempting to seize the city. The rebels used small, nonstandard squads with as few as two men as mobile antitank teams. These elements, armed with only AK-47s, grenades, and RPG-7s or RPG-18s, engaged Russian armored vehicles from either basements or upper stories of buildings, where main tanks and other weapons could not effectively return fire. Once in their trap, ambush teams would strike the vulnerable points of Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers, hit the lead and trail vehicles, quickly withdraw, and then move up the flanks to strike the now paralyzed Russian columns again. Between January 1 and January 3, 1995, the Russian 131st Motorized Rifle Brigade lost 102 of 120 armored vehicles and twenty of twenty-six tanks due to these and other methods. Out of the thirty-one T-80BV tanks sent into Grozny with the 3rd Tank Battalion, 6th Tank Regiment, only one tank survived the battle fully operational.

Snipers are a force multiplier while conducting a defense:

The Battle of Stalingrad epitomizes the use of snipers in urban warfare. While the Russians were on the defensive in Stalingrad in 1942, their snipers proved devastating to German forces. Snipers during the battle became national heroes, tallying hundreds of kills. Famous Soviet snipers, like Vasily Ivanovich Zaitsev, mastered the urban terrain and developed new tactics such as using pipes or old barrels as hide sites and making unimaginable shots. The effectiveness of the snipers had a devastating real and physiological impact on the Germans.

The militant drone threat is not new so much as it is persistent

Monday, March 7th, 2022

The militant drone threat is no longer new, so why does it still feel novel?

In a now ubiquitous quote, as he spoke of the challenges faced by US and coalition forces in 2016, Gen. Raymond A. Thomas, commander of US Special Operations Command, stated that the “most daunting problem was an adaptive enemy who, for a time, enjoyed tactical superiority in the airspace under our conventional air superiority in the form of commercially available drones and [field]-expedient weapons systems.” In 2021, the military’s assessment carried the same tone. Just last year, US Gen. Kenneth McKenzie referred to the proliferation of small drones as the “most concerning tactical development” within US Central Command’s area of responsibility.

At this point, the militant drone threat is not “new” so much as it is persistent. Yet the threat still feels novel. This dissonance is partly due to the slow rate of progress made toward developing an effective and sustainable counterdrone infrastructure. Put another way, the threat feels new because it is unresolved.

[…]

Most of the deployed counterdrone systems are based on air defense systems, which are designed to identify and shoot down large and fast-moving objects. Drones, especially makeshift or COTS drones, are typically small, slow, low flying, and able to sustain erratic flight patterns—a tactical mismatch. Given the number of specialized tasks required of the kill chain, the variety of drone types faced by US military forces, and the likelihood of continued innovation by militant actors, a single-system solution is unlikely to be effective and sustainable in the short and intermediate term.

[…]

In a now-infamous case, in 2017, an unidentified ally of the United States shot down a small quadcopter drone with a $3.4 million Patriot missile. That cost-benefit ratio is unique but illustrates an important point. To be viable and sustainable, a counterdrone approach must be cost effective, rather than exacerbate the asymmetric nature of state-militant conflict.

According to a recent report, among counterdrone products for which pricing information is available, over 60 percent cost more than $100,000. That’s troubling. Most COTS drone systems cost well under $1,000.

[…]

Most innovations will be small in scale, but carry potential for outsized tactical and strategic effects. For instance, in campaigns in Iraq and Syria, Islamic State fighters reportedly wrapped tape around parts of their drones to avoid detection by masking the radar signature. If kinetic, weapons-based options are used to intercept drones, then militants may switch to using them in more populous areas to discourage government forces from harming civilian bystanders. Radio frequency and radar systems are best at detecting incoming drones when they have a clear line of sight, and the physical complexity of urban spaces offers militants a means of avoiding detection. The possibilities for innovation and avoidance are sufficiently large that it will be wise to avoid placing all eggs in a single basket.

The first shipment of Javelins arrived in 2018

Sunday, March 6th, 2022

The Javelin has been fielded to the U.S. Military since the mid-1990s

However, it came to great notoriety during the 2003 invasion of Iraq when Green Berets from 3rd Special Forces Group pushed across the green line with Peshmerga fighters and engaged an enemy armor battalion. Over the course of several days, ODA 391 and ODA 392 called in airstrikes and fired a total of 19 Javelin missiles at enemy trucks, armored personnel carriers, and T-55 tanks.

Of the 19 missiles fired, 17 resulted in hits. Interestingly, although the manual states that the maximum effective range of the Javelin is 2,000 meters, all of the shots fired during what became known as the Battle of Debecka Pass were over 2,200 meters. The longest shot was 4,200 meters. The Green Berets demonstrated that a small unconventional force could take on an enemy armor unit with the proper mix of ground mobility vehicles, Javelin anti-tank missiles, and close air support.

[…]

The FGM-148 Javelin consists of two separate components, the reusable Command Launch Unit (CLU) and the launch tube that houses the missile itself. The CLU consists of a body with a day site, thermal sight, hand grips, battery compartment, firing mechanism, and the interface that actually attaches the CLU to the launch.

[…]

In 2015 and 2016, officials were still debating the merits of giving the Ukrainian military the Javelin for fears that it could provoke another Russian invasion. Bureaucrats argued amongst themselves as to how to mitigate the risk by engaging in games of semantics.

[…]

A deal was worked out that they would call it defensive aid, with the pre-requisite that the Ukrainians could only use it if fired upon first. Also, the weapon systems would be locked up in a secure facility, and only issued out to the military during an emergency. The Ukrainians shrugged off the conditions and dully agreed.

The first shipment of Javelins arrived in 2018, the weapons systems along with a training and sustainment block (called the Total Package Approach) totaling somewhere around 75 million dollars. “It takes like 18 months to get shit approved, then it spends six months on a boat,” the U.S. Military official complained, saying that we are way behind in providing training in assistance when other countries go to Russia and request fighter jets or helicopters and get them in a couple of weeks.

But the first shipment did arrive, and initial training was conducted by a contractor from Lockheed before the training program was taken over by the Security Assistance Training Management Organization (SATMO). This little-known organization has Warrant Officers, Master Gunners, and others on staff specifically to train foreign partner forces. Working with the Ukrainian military for six years, SATMO delivered an additional 200,000 pounds of lethal military aid to Ukraine in late 2021.

[…]

A U.S. Special Operations official monitoring the conflict in Ukraine told Connecting Vets that he had seen estimates of 280 Russian armored vehicles taken out by the Javelin as of this writing, out of 300 total missiles fired.

US nuclear deterrence extends no further than the most forward US soldier

Sunday, March 6th, 2022

Jacob Stoil shares seven strategic lessons from the first days of the war in Ukraine. The first two are sobering:

Lesson 1: The logic of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction has not changed.

Throughout the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war kept the nuclear powers from engaging directly. Indeed, a clear show of sufficiently armed resolve was generally enough to prevent escalation by the other power. It is hard to conceive of any limited objective worth nuclear war. This led to careful deployments. US forces did not protect Hungary in 1956, nor did Soviet forces press their advantage around Berlin. Both sides generally accompanied their troop movements and forward deployments with significant escalation-control measures.

The US deployment in Eastern Europe over the last several months continues to reflect this logic. As Russia became more bellicose toward Ukraine, the United States was careful to deploy to NATO countries. The countries were not areas likely to see aggression by Russian conventional forces, at least in this round of conflict. This unchanged prevailing logic also means that a great power adversary is unlikely to engage any robust US deployment through large-scale conventional means. At the same time, it does not make wars less likely because of what became known among deterrence scholars during the Cold War as the stability-instability paradox. The logic of this paradox did not go away when the Soviet Union collapsed. At its essence this paradox suggests that because of mutually assured destruction, nuclear-armed great powers will engage in proxy conflicts (such as in Syria) or limited operations against their rivals, while at the same time feeling more comfortable in engaging in conflicts against minor non-nuclear-armed powers because they believe that once war starts a rival great power will not intervene through conventional military means. This tendency is clearly evident in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Lesson 2: US nuclear deterrence extends no further than the most forward US soldier.

This lesson follows from the first. Nuclear deterrence is determined by the perception of commitment. This explains in no small part why large numbers of US forces spent the Cold War forward deployed in Europe. Presence and commitment go hand in hand. At the heart of the matter is the question of which county has to make the decision to risk a potential nuclear confrontation. In this regard the limitations of nuclear deterrence reflect the theory of first-mover advantage. If there are significant numbers of US military personnel in area, then to launch a large conventional attack on that place is to choose to risk the possibility of escalation. Attacking a country that has no significant US presence forces the United States to choose to risk escalation over a conflict of comparatively limited national interest.

Rotational forces provide deterrence when they are present but no deterrence when they are not. Only a permanent presence serves to create the deterrent effect. If the United States has not backed up its commitment on the ground, then that commitment, in effect, does not exist. The recent requests from NATO countries near Ukraine for an enhanced US military presence reflect this principle. The military presence does not have to be sufficiently robust to repel a large-scale offensive by a rival great power but it does have to be sufficient to demonstrate that any invasion will cause escalation and a great power war. The deployment of the 82nd Airborne Division to Poland matches this logic exactly.

At its most fundamental this lesson should teach us to think of US presence as signaling not only our resolve to defend one country, but also our lack of resolve to defend those countries in which we do not commit permanent forces. By deploying to the NATO countries of Eastern Europe and not to Ukraine we signaled Russia that we were not committed to the defense of Ukraine and our deterrent umbrella did not cover the country. This was a critical step in the development of the Russia campaign. As a result, Russia gained the first-mover advantage, which will make any attempt to affect Russian forces’ removal far more difficult. This lesson has direct relevance to any place, such as Taiwan, to which the United States has made a commitment but does not have an enduring presence.

We have built our military around small numbers of large, expensive, exquisite, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace platforms

Saturday, March 5th, 2022

The kill chain is a process that occurs on the battlefield or wherever militaries compete, Christian Brose explains:

It involves three steps:

The first is gaining understanding about what is happening.

The second is making a decision about what to do.

And the third is taking action that creates an effect to achieve an objective.

When members of the US military complete that process of understanding, deciding, and acting, they refer to it as “closing the kill chain.”

And when they thwart the ability of a rival military to do so itself, they call that “breaking the kill chain.”

The United States spends close to three-quarters of one trillion dollars on national defense each year, he notes:

That is more than the next eight countries spend put together. That money buys a lot of military capability — fighter jets, submarines, aircraft carriers, battle tanks, attack helicopters, nuclear weapons, and hundreds of thousands of incredibly well-armed people.

[…]

The problem is not that America is spending too little on defense. The problem is that America is playing a losing game. Over many decades we have built our military around small numbers of large, expensive, exquisite, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace platforms that struggle to close the kill chain as one battle network.

[…]

China, meanwhile, has built large numbers of multi-million-dollar weapons to find and attack America’s small numbers of exponentially more expensive military platforms.

The power to hurt confers bargaining power

Friday, March 4th, 2022

When military practitioners encounter coercion theory, Tami Davis Biddle notes, they tend to be skeptical that theories produced by academics can help them understand war:

After all, academics dwell in the realm of the abstract and the theoretical while military professionals dwell in the realm of the concrete and the real. Moreover, military professionals are not entirely comfortable with violence as a bargaining process. One does not, they believe, “bargain” with one’s enemies — one fights them. Nor do they find congenial the idea that coercion requires the cooperation of the enemy. Even if one explains that this is by no means happy cooperation, it rankles nonetheless because they (especially those in the U.S. military) believe they should own the initiative and maintain dominance across the full spectrum of conflict at all times.

The word “coercion” itself sits uneasily with military professionals. It has overtones of blackmail and manipulation, which are anathema to their self-identity. In general, they also do not take readily to Schelling’s emphasis on threats. While they fully understand deterrence, they may draw back from the idea that they are in the business of “threatening” others (and sometimes making those threats credible by actions) in order to deter and compel. For Schelling, conflicts involving coercion unfold through a kind of violent communication about intentions and commitment. Understandably, few military officers see killing and dying as just a form of communication.

[…]

Schelling was interested in the ability of military power to “hurt” the enemy — to inflict pain or punishment — and the inherent “bargaining power” this confers. Coercion is about future pain, about structuring the enemy’s incentives so that he behaves in a particular way. It manipulates the power to hurt and involves making a threat to do something one has not yet done. The coercer forces another actor to calculate, to decide — based on his own interests and position — whether or not to resist the threat being made.

Observing human behavior, Schelling recognized that humans use threats constantly to shape the behavior of others. We do this for a range of reasons. Anyone who has raised a child has learned quickly how to influence that child’s choices: A parent may issue a threat in order to keep a child from harm, or to set boundaries to help prepare the child for civil interaction with others. As children grow older, the content of those behavior-influencing threats must change in order to reflect the child’s level of comprehension and new interests and the parent’s changing leverage over the child’s behavior.

Similarly, if we wish to keep our homes safe from intruders, we may install a security system and then post a sign advertising it. A potential intruder is alerted to the negative consequences that will greet any attempt to enter without permission. This action is meant to deter — to prevent someone from taking an action he otherwise might take. But threats can be used to compel actions as well as deter them. In the film The Godfather, Don Corleone promises to influence the decisions of the head of a film studio, stating, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” If the recipient of the threat refuses to accept the “offer” (which is actually a demand), then harm will follow. The coercive threat is designed to compel an individual to do something he would prefer not to do. If the threat derives from a source known to be willing and able to produce harm, then it is credible and must be taken seriously.

An actor being coerced (i.e., the target state) must assess its own willingness and ability to endure pain, as well as the credibility of the adversary’s threat. “The power to hurt,” Schelling explained, “is a kind of bargaining power, not easy to use, but used often.” Even great powers possessing high levels of coercive leverage over others find that target states can resist in unexpected ways, making the line between the application of power and the achievement of a desired outcome anything but direct and straightforward. By its nature, coercion requires a decision by the actor being coerced, thus placing the outcome in the actor’s hands. This is what makes coercion difficult and complex — and distinct from a more direct use of power that Schelling defined as “brute force,” wherein there is no need for a decision by the target state because power is imposed directly in such a way as to obviate choice.

[…]

The power to hurt confers bargaining power, Schelling insisted. The willingness to exploit it is diplomacy — “vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.”

Schelling explained that the use of “the power to hurt” operates like blackmail in that it exploits an enemy’s fears and needs. The power to hurt is usually most successful when it is held in reserve. Hostages, for instance, are taken and held for coercive purposes. Those taking the hostages seek to make another actor give up something — money, political prisoners, etc. But if they kill the hostage, the other actor no longer has an incentive to concede and coercive hostage-taking fails. Any coercive act that kills the hostage, as it were, reduces its own effectiveness. Hostages, Schelling argued, “represent the power to hurt in its purest form.”

In Schelling’s taxonomy, “coercion” is an overarching category encompassing both “deterrence” and “compellence.” The word “deterrence” was in common usage when he wrote Arms and Influence. The term “compellence” he coined himself, after rejecting several alternatives. Since 1966, it has become part of the lexicon of security studies. (Schelling admired, but chose not to select, the terms “dissuasion” and “persuasion” that J. David Singer had used several years earlier to describe a similar idea.)

Deterrence involves a threat to keep an adversary “from starting something,” or “to prevent [an adversary] from action by fear of consequences.” Compellence is “a threat intended to make an adversary do something.” In deterrence, the punishment will be imposed if the adversary acts; in compellence, the punishment is usually imposed until the adversary acts. As noted, the central characteristic of both forms of coercion is that they depend, ultimately, on cooperation by the party receiving the threat. This is by no means friendly cooperation, but it is cooperation nonetheless. Compellence can be used in peacetime and in wartime, the former use being referred to generally as coercive diplomacy.

Alexander Downes describes coercion as “the art of manipulating costs and benefits to affect the behavior of an actor.” Explaining its two forms, he writes, “Deterrence consists of threats of force designed to persuade a target to refrain from taking a particular action. Compellence, by contrast, utilizes force — or threats of force — to propel a target to take an action, or to stop taking an action it has already started.” The United States, he notes, is one of the most frequent users of compellent threats. Examples abound. Sometimes they involve the use (or threatened use) of U.S. troops, and sometimes they do not. But military power always stands in the background. In one notable example from 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower used economic and diplomatic threats to compel the British, French, and Israelis to cease the military operations they had begun in response to Egypt nationalizing the Suez Canal. More recently, the administration of President Donald Trump used a threat of economic sanctions to try to compel the Mexican government to more aggressively discourage population flows across the U.S. border.

One way or another, the Russian war in Ukraine will wind down

Friday, March 4th, 2022

Mathew Burrows and Christopher Preble argue that the impulse to cut Russia out of the international system is understandable but also impractical:

In the wake of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, it is tempting to want to go beyond the very severe sanctions that the West has imposed, even as the publics in both the United States and Europe are not prepared for the likely economic pain. Others have proposed that NATO impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, or provide arms to the Ukrainians resisting Russian aggression, which would not affect Americans’ pocketbooks, but do increase the risk of escalation that could directly threaten global security.

The overriding question, therefore, is of how to ensure the punishment is appropriate, and eliminates the potential for long-term damage.

[…]

There is a tendency in the short-term to focus on the morally superior stance, that it is always better to aid the defenders against the aggressors. But it is worth asking whether that is in the best interest of the Ukrainian people, for example if the additional arms prolong a war that might otherwise have ended more quickly in a negotiated settlement.

[…]

People like to imagine turning Ukraine into Putin’s Afghanistan, but they should remember the extraordinary — even sometimes absurd — lengths that the Carter and Reagan administrations employed to conceal U.S. involvement in that earlier war (even though the Soviets were quite aware). As Austin Carson explains in his book Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics, the United States worried about the spread of the conflict should that support be disclosed. And there were inadvertent consequences as well. The United States’ arming of the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan, though justified at the time, eventually produced al-Qaeda.

One way or another, the Russian war in Ukraine will wind down. Our common interests should push toward something other than a new Cold War between Russia and the West. All parties should recall that decades-long confrontation, with vast armies massed along militarized borders, as a tragedy to be avoided. The only thing worse, also a distinct possibility, is World War III.

[…]

Efforts to totally isolate Russia will increase its dependence on China, and no doubt expand Western frictions with Beijing, further accelerating deglobalization. The dramatic expansion of trade and cultural exchange over the last three decades opened up unprecedented economic opportunities for the world, almost ending extreme poverty. Putin deserves to be punished, but not at the cost of a much poorer future for everyone.

Scary countries are deeply vulnerable to paid desertion

Thursday, March 3rd, 2022

Ukraine is offering amnesty plus five million rubles (about $48,000) to anyone who deserts from the Russian army and agrees to go to a Ukrainian prison, and Bryan Caplan suggests some improvements to this deal:

On the surface, this sounds like a sweet deal, but on reflection, it’s anything but. Put yourself in the shoes of a Russian soldier. First, you have to elude the Red Army, knowing you could be shot for desertion. Then, you have to surrender without getting killed by Ukrainians. After that, you’re stuck in prison; maybe they’ll deposit you in a regular POW camp, complete with Russian loyalists ready to kill you when the guard’s not looking. Wherever you languish, you know your fate hinges on the outcome of the war.

[…]

But let me propose a Version 2.0 to better fulfill the intent of the original offer.

Version 2.0: The EU, in cooperation with Ukraine, offers $100,000 plus EU citizenship to any Russian deserter. Russians can either go directly to the EU, or surrender to Ukrainian forces for speedy transport to the EU border.

The key gain: Deserters no longer have to gamble on Ukrainian success. As long as they escape from the Red Army’s zone of control, they survive. A much better gamble.

Extra benefits: Instead of going to a Ukrainian prison or POW camp, you get to enjoy freedom in the EU. And the EU is far more likely to swiftly hand over the promised monetary bounty.

How much of a burden is this on the EU? Chump change, really. Even in a magical scenario where all of the roughly 200,000 Russian troops in the vicinity take the deal, $100,000 per soldier is a mere $20 billion. That’s less than one-fifth of what Germany now plans to spend on defense in 2022 alone. It wouldn’t be crazy to go up to $1,000,000 per deserter. You could even do a classic multi-tier offer, where the first 10,000 deserters get a million bucks each to compensate for the high initial risk, followed by lower payments for late-leavers who get to desert in comparative safety.

[…]

Scary countries are deeply vulnerable to paid desertion, while the nicest countries are almost immune. How much would Russia have to offer Germans to desert to Russia? Nein, danke!

The United States, unusually, is not a central protagonist in this military conflict

Thursday, March 3rd, 2022

It’s an odd place for an American president, Matt Welch of Reason notes:

His country sits transfixed by a war more than 4,500 miles to the east, rooting openly in solidarity for the hopelessly outgunned underdogs fighting bravely for their homeland against a ruthless invader from Moscow. Hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees have already poured out to the West, while the young men back home fashion Molotov cocktails to hurl at tanks. The United States, unusually, is not a central protagonist in this military conflict, to the disappointment of both the ragtag rebels and some overenthusiastic hawks back home.

U.S. history being long enough, the above description fits another State of the Union address: Dwight D. Eisenhower’s somber message to Congress on January 10, 1957, two months after the dramatic and bloody Soviet putdown of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, an event seared into the memory of the Americans who lived through it. Time had declared the “Hungarian Freedom Fighter” its 1956 Man of the Year; Elvis Presley hawked donations for refugees on The Ed Sullivan Show. Even Jean-Paul Sartre broke with his longtime communist comrades (as did many fellow travelers in the West).

[…]

Having foregrounded this “season of stress that is testing the fitness of political systems and the validity of political philosophies,” Ike then laid out two very different approaches to confronting it: patient institution-building in Europe, and a more hegemonic responsibility for security arrangements in the Middle East. Biden would be good to learn lessons from both.

“The recent historic events in Hungary demand that all free nations share to the extent of their capabilities in the responsibility of granting asylum to victims of Communist persecution,” Eisenhower said. So asylum, not bombs.

The president also emphasized non-military means of bolstering the anti-communist bulwark in still-rebuilding Western Europe. “We must emphasize aid to our friends in building more productive economies and in better satisfying the natural demands of their people,” he said. Critical to that effort were long-term tariff reduction and mutual cooperation. “We welcome the efforts of a number of our European friends to achieve an integrated community to develop a common market.” For the duration of the Cold War, increasingly freer trade would be seen by Washington as an essential component of strengthening what was then called “the free world.”

None of these measures provided anything like immediate relief for Polish workers, Hungarian students, or other routed freedom fighters in the East Bloc. But — importantly! — they also avoided hot military conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers, while also clearing the way for the eventual anti-communist revolutions of 1989 by the very people who’d been subjugated for so long.

Track the buildup of logistic forces and supply dumps rather than count battalion tactical groups

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022

The Russian army has the combat power to capture the objectives envisioned in a fait accompli scenario, Alex Vershinin notes — in November 2021 — but it does not have the logistic forces to do it in a single push without a logistical pause to reset its sustainment infrastructure:

NATO planners should develop plans focusing on exploiting Russian logistic challenges rather than trying to address the disparity in combat power. This involves drawing the Russian army deep into NATO territory and stretching Russian supply lines to the maximum while targeting logistics and transportation infrastructure such as trucks, railroad bridges, and pipelines. Committing to a decisive battle at the frontier would play directly into Russian hands, allowing a shorter supply to compensate for their logistic shortfalls.

This sounds a lot like the proper strategy for the Soviet Union to use against Nazi Germany in the 1940s.

Russian army logistics forces are not designed for a large-scale ground offensive far from their railroads:

Inside maneuver units, Russian sustainment units are a size lower than their Western counterparts. Only brigades have an equivalent logistics capability, but it’s not an exact comparison. Russian formations have only three-quarters the number of combat vehicles as their U.S. counterparts but almost three times as much artillery. On paper (not all brigades have a full number of battalions), Russian brigades have two artillery battalions, a rocket battalion, and two air defense battalions per brigade as opposed to one artillery battalion and an attached air defense company per U.S. brigade. As a result of extra artillery and air defense battalions, the Russian logistics requirements are much larger than their U.S. counterparts.

[…]

The reason Russia is unique in having railroad brigades is that logistically, Russian forces are tied to railroad from factory to army depot and to combined arms army and, where possible, to the division/brigade level. No other European nation uses railroads to the extent that the Russian army does. Part of the reason is that Russia is so vast — over 6,000 miles from one end to the other. The rub is that Russian railroads are a wider gauge than the rest of Europe. Only former Soviet nations and Finland still use the Russian standard — this includes the Baltic states.

[…]

If an army has just enough trucks to sustain itself at a 45-mile distance, then at 90 miles, the throughput will be 33 percent lower. At 180 miles, it will be down by 66 percent. The further you push from supply dumps, the fewer supplies you can replace in a single day.

The Russian army does not have enough trucks to meet its logistic requirement more than 90 miles beyond supply dumps. To reach a 180-mile range, the Russian army would have to double truck allocation to 400 trucks for each of the material-technical support brigades.

[…]

Historically, urban combat consumes massive amounts of ammunition and takes months to conclude. During the two most prominent examples, the battles of Grozny in the Chechen wars and the Battle of Mosul in 2016, defenders tied down four to 10 times their numbers for up to four months. At Grozny, Russians were firing up to 4,000 shells a day — that’s 50 trucks a day.

[…]

The logistics are also useful to assess a Ukrainian conflict as Russian forces are again massing on the border. The best means of interpreting the seriousness of Russian intentions is to track the buildup of logistic forces and supply dumps rather than count battalion tactical groups that have moved to the border. The size and scale of logistic preparation tell us exactly how far and deep is Russian army planning to go.

They began clearing buildings from the top down

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022

Canadian forces evolved their tactics during the Battle of Ortona, from December 20 to December 27, 1943, as they took the eastern anchor of the Gustav Line:

When the Canadians had fought their way to the older part of the town, they encountered buildings that were much more densely situated than those in the south, with many of them sharing adjoining walls. Recognizing this, and after clearing a building of the enemy, Captain Bill Longhurst of the Loyal Eddies’ A Company directed his infantry pioneers and engineers to use explosives to blow holes on the top floors of the connected buildings to move from one to another via the upper levels. This helped to address the problem of heavy casualties they were taking when soldiers were exposed on the streets and entering through booby-trapped doors and windows to clear structures from the bottom up. After the holes in the top floors were created, the Canadians utilized grenades and small arms to enter and clear the rooms. From that point forward, they began clearing buildings from the top down, killing the surprised Germans with explosive charges or showering them with grenades and automatic fire while moving downward. After clearing the building, the Loyal Eddies would just return to the top floor of the now clear building to repeat the process into the next one. Soon, the Seaforths were copying this technique, called “mouseholing.”

The Canadians demonstrated great adaptability as they now entered into the heart of the German defense. The Three Rivers Regiment tank personnel began using different types of ammunition—the first round to strike a building was an antitank shell to make the hole and initially kill whoever was inside, and the second was a frangible round that would be fired through the newly created hole to finish off the remaining Germans inside. The tanks rapidly became a vital part of the infantry and engineer assaults of enemy-held buildings. The tanks were also used as sustainment platforms during lulls in attacks, bringing ammunition and supplies up to the front lines and ferrying the wounded back to casualty collection points.

[...]

The sheer amount of ammunition used by Canadian forces illustrates the intensity of this battle. Soon after the battle began individual infantry soldiers from both the Loyal Eddies and Seaforths were each given a daily issue of twelve to fifteen grenades, and Canadian engineers eagerly used an abundance of abandoned German munitions and mines on top of their supply of explosives to create mouseholes or bring down houses. In just eight days of fighting, the Loyal Eddies used 918 antitank shells, 4,050 three-inch mortar rounds, two thousand two-inch mortar rounds, fifty-seven thousand .303-caliber rounds, 4,800 submachine gun bullets, six hundred No. 36 “Mills bomb” hand grenades, and seven hundred No. 77 smoke grenades.

Moscow may perceive a NATO nuclear response to lack credibility

Tuesday, March 1st, 2022

While the U.S. and Russia have a similar number of deployed strategic (i.e., high-yield) nuclear weapons as limited under New START, Russia has a 10:1 advantage over us in nonstrategic (i.e., low-yield) nuclear weapons — aka tactical or battlefield nukes:

Today, while open-source numbers are fuzzy, Russia has about 2,000 nonstrategic nuclear weapons, while the U.S. has about 200 total — with half in the U.S. and half in Europe as part of NATO.

[...]

The idea is Russia might employ one (or more) tactical nuclear weapon during a conventional conflict with NATO forces to prevent a defeat, consolidate gains, or even freeze a conflict in place without further fighting.

Because the disparity between Russian and U.S. tactical nuclear weapons is so large, Moscow may perceive a NATO nuclear response to lack credibility.