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?
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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.”