Monthly Archives: January 2023

By Michael F. Duggan

We round out January with another round of dangerous escalation in the Russo-Ukrainian War, or at least an escalatory IOU.  In terms of military hardware promised, the war is starting to look like an updated version of the one that the United States and Soviet Union successfully avoided fighting during 1945-91.  

War is fundamentally unpredictable, and the war in Ukraine has too many moving parts and too many unknowns to make precise adumbrate possible.  That said, when one considers the bigger Clausewitzian picture of relative resources that may be brought to bear (as opposed to individual Jominian facts, like the Russian reverses, or consolidations, in the northeast and in the south around Kherson), it appears that the Russians could win the war within a matter of months. 

To date, the war has been characterized by a series of continuing rounds of escalation.  Over the summer the U.S. and Britain gave the Ukrainians M142 HIMARS and M270 MLRS rocket systems, and in the fall, began training them in the use of Patriot missiles. There was the Russian announcement on September 21, 2022 of a partial mobilization and the annexation of the eastern Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhia. Then there is the persisting Russian drone and missile offensive designed to degrade Ukrainian infrastructure and power grids and the Ukrainian retaliatory strikes against Russian airbase near Engels that houses a part of their TU-95 and TU-160 nuclear bomber fleet.  After that came the announcement that the U.S. would be providing the Ukrainians with Bradley Fighting Vehicles (BFV) and Stryker Infantry Carrying Vehicles (ICV).  There were the recent Russian advances around Bakhmut and Soledar and ongoing speculation of a Russian winter or spring offensive possibly beginning this month (February).  Escalations continue and the danger is that things that are easily ratcheted up may not be as easily brought down again.   

The latest escalation was last week’s announcement by the U.S. and Germany to supply the Ukrainian Army with 31 Abrams (M1A2) and 14 Leopard II tanks (and this week Canada, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and the UK have also pledged tanks, possibly bringing the total to 321, or the heavy armor compliment of two tank divisions).  The Russians responded to this with a particularly heavy barrage of drones and cruise missiles on January 26 that reportedly killed 11 Ukrainian civilians.  Until this week, President Zelensky’s lobbying campaign for modern heavy armor had been a mostly tankless effort.  No more, apparently.

But if providing main battle tanks (MBT) had previously been taboo, then why now (besides the obvious answer that it is the next logical step in a protracted, escalating war)?

One answer might be that Western politicians and war planners realize that motorized infantry hardware like BFVs and ICVs would be of limited use in a modern combined arms campaign without heavy armor.  Perhaps they believe that Western tanks might be Ukraine’s only hope for repelling a Russian offensive. 

Of course the real answer might be the opposite of this, cynicism, for instance. Given that the Leopards will not be arriving for two or more months and the Abrams—which will be built for the Ukrainians rather than taken from existing U.S. stockpiles—will probably be coming in six months to a year, they may be as about as relevant as reinforcements for the defenders of Bataan, Wake Island, or the Alamo shipping on a similar schedule.  But their effects may be felt immediately and not in the way that is intended.  With the 321 tanks now in the offing, their practical value will be as a signal of determination and a desire to up the ante: i.e. a provocation for further escalation.  When they do arrive—assuming that Ukrainians can be trained to use and repair these highly complex machines in a reasonable amount of time—their other practical effect will likely be to lengthen and intensify the war, therefore increasing casualties and prolonging the suffering on both sides.   

Of course, the most obvious answer to “why tanks, why now?” is an assertion of NATO solidarity—an encouragement for others to send heavy armor—a reaffirmation of U.S. leadership and cover for European nations to follow suite, which they now have.  But this also suggests a dangerous lack of concern over the possibility of Russia reacting disproportionately.  The all-important question for policymakers about assumptions of provocative escalatory measures in a game of nuclear-backed brinksmanship is: what if you are wrong? After all, another way of interpreting the pledge for tanks would be to say that the West is willing to send heavy weapons built in the United States, Germany, and the UK to a nation on Russia’s western border to kill Russian troops.  If the situation was reversed, how would NATO respond?  How would the U.S. react if the Russians were supplying their latest tanks to anti-American forces in Canada?

The lesson the Russians take away from this gesture could be quite different from the intended one, and it may force unintended consequences.  Although a Russian offensive in the near future is likely, the scheduling of German armor for arrival in the spring (?) may compel them to invade well before arrival of the tanks, sooner rather than later. Thus the pledge may actually provoke the attack. And if the Russian attack is successful in decisively defeating the Ukrainian Ground Forces, then a far more dangerous escalation on the part of the West may be inevitable.

Ever since the 1990s, the U.S. foreign policy apparatus (“The Blob”) has been dominated by Neocons and other genera of interventionists.  Their self image is heavily invested in the eastward expansion of NATO.  And the front lines are now in Ukraine. Victory in Ukraine (whatever that might mean) means everything to them, and if hawks like Antony Blinken and zealots like Victoria Nuland have anything to say about it, Ukrainian defeat will not be an option.

If Russia defeats the Ukrainian Army in the coming months, thus forcing the collapse or decapitation of the Zelensky government, would the U.S. and Poland just stand by?  In rational terms there would be little they could do in a conventional military sense, short of committing the West to an all-out war with Russia and its allies. 

But given that a Ukrainian defeat, or anything perceived as a weak Western response to it, would spell disaster for the Democrats in 2024—and given the Trotskyite fervor of The Blob and the considerable, perhaps irresistible, political pressure that would be brought to bear on the administration—would the U.S. and its allies be compelled to enter directly into the fighting?  If they did, it would mark the start of the Third World War, a war that would likely have a nuclear ending.     

Given the insufficient numbers of promised tanks and the unrealistic timetable of training Ukrainian tank crews and mechanics and actually delivering the weapons, the final possibility is that the promise to send tanks is all just window dressing in a war that may soon be lost—a preemptive political fig leaf. The purpose would be to show that the West is doing all it can, albeit for domestic consumption.  This way the administration can point to the tank promise as proof that the United States did everything it could to win the war short of intervention. Let’s hope that this is the real purpose for the tank pledge. Otherwise it is just one more step toward Armageddon.

Like other complex chaotic phenomena, wars are fundamentally unpredictable. As Justice Holmes reminds us, “…I accept no prophecy with confidence. The unforeseen is generally what happens.”  On the other hand, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just moved the Doomsday Clock up to 90 seconds to midnight.  By comparison, it was at 7 minutes (420 seconds) to midnight during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

By Michael F. Duggan

Norman Mailer would have been 100 this Tuesday. He was certainly not everybody’s cup of tea, but he was one of the most important writers and public intellectual celebrities of the postwar era. I can’t think of anybody today who fills the niche he once occupied.

He had ego and talent and showed real brilliance and occasional hostility in interviews and talk shows during the 1960s and ‘70s (he famously head-butted Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971, after his anger at something Vidal had written about him and and uncompromising boorishness had turned the live audience against him). With the exception of Vidal, he tended to like his artistic competitors and ideological opponents. He and Bill Buckley were wary friends.

But there is something loutishly impressive about him—he was a real sweating human being with real insights, unlike so many of the increasingly mainstream extremists, cable TV cheap shot artists, conspiracy gurus, and tepid, blow-dried network lightweights of our own time. He was problematic and didn’t pull punches (literally or figuratively) or water down his message. Although he once called himself a “libertarian socialist,” and was critical of mainstream progressivism, he was of that last generation of liberals who had guts and were not afraid to stir the pot and say exactly what they thought regardless of the consequences. It is hard to square the puckish old man who discussed his book, The Spooky Art (about writing), with Charlie Rose in 2003, and who made an appearance on The Gilmore Girls the following year, with the two-fisted brawler of a few decades before who mixed it up with feminists and reactionaries alike.

One of the most notable postwar American realists ( that included Saul Bellow, James Jones, Philip Roth, and John Updike), Mailer was a best-selling author at 25, having written what is either the greatest or second greatest American novel about WWII, The Naked and the Dead (Catch-22 is arguably more important, if less realistic; Slaughterhouse Five and some of James Jones’s novels are also up there). This book, which was published in 1948 and added the word “fug” to the American lexicon, also has much to say about our own time (see “Mailer’s Ghost” on this blog, November 7, 2022). Notably, he was every adolescent boy’s instant excuse for “reading” Playboy.

His best books are good, but he wrote a lot, and, in some of his articles, you have to wade through a fair amount of crap to get to the gold nuggets. He had real psychological insight, in part growing out of a deep and honest understanding of himself and his own flaws. The chief problem with his analyses of US policy was a tendency to reduce events to the personal psychology of national leaders.

His nonfiction novels The Armies of the Night (on the antiwar march on the Pentagon in 1967), and The Executioner’s Song (about Gary Gilmore) are classics of journalistic realism. If you have a chance, take the time to look at Buckley’s interviews with him on these books as well as Mailer’s confrontation with Vidal on the Cavett show. His 1959 collection of articles and short fiction, Advertisements for Myself, is considered a milestone of the New Journalism. He admired Hemingway, although by his own admission, his writing style is more verbose and less distinctive. He was a student and practitioner of the hip, but eluded labels like hipster (original meaning) and beat. In 1955 he was one of the founders of The Village Voice.

A liberal who was frequently accused of sexism, he was married six times and appears to have been unhinged at times (he stabbed one wife and had a penchant for the “sport” of head-butting people at parties)¹ In 1969 he ran for mayor of New York City with legendary reporter, Jimmy Breslin, under the slogans “No More Bullshit!” and “Vote the Bums in!” Their platform included a plan to make the city the 51st state.

While we should not emulate the worst sides of Norman Mailer, there is something authentic and original about him. I am not sure how many people read him anymore, but he has a lot to offer our troubled, if morally superior, times. He died on November 10, 2007.

Note
1). Mailer’s enthusiasm for head-butting is well known. According to James Grady, Mailer head-butted G. Gordon Liddy one night in September 1990, sending the Watergate tough guy fleeing into the darkness.
https://lithub.com/the-time-i-watched-norman-mailer-try-to-fight-g-gordon-liddy-in-the-street/

By Michael F. Duggan

In the summer of 1864, the Union war effort was grinding to a halt. The Confederates had been defeated at Gettysburg and Vicksburg the previous July, but finishing the job was proving to be difficult for the Union. Sherman’s Military Division of the Mississippi and Grant’s Army of the Potomac were both stalled face to face with Confederate forces in a war of position outside of Atlanta and at Petersburg, south of Richmond.

In the 18th century—having learned their lessons from the total wars of the 17th century—European generals and princes sought to fight limited “cabinet wars.” Warfare was thus reduced to a chess-like game reflected in the doctrine of Swiss soldier and military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini. From the second half of the American Civil War onward, Western great powers wars tended toward total warfare and the more comprehensive view of conflict espoused by Clausewitz. In the atomic age, following hard upon the most destructive war in history, the overarching question facing strategists and war planners was how to keep the game alive without it turning nuclear. After the nuclear-heavy “New Look” grand strategy of the Eisenhower years, the Kennedy administration opted for “Flexible Response,” which certainly kept the game alive, but also made smaller, limited, wars more likely.¹

But in the later stages of the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman realized that in order to defeat the Confederacy, he would have to defeat the South as a whole and not just Southern armies, which had often defeated Union forces on the battlefield. From 1863 to 1864, the nature of the war changed from piecemeal “Napoleonic” battles to something more like modern campaigns punctuate by major clashes: Grant would fight Lee in an existential struggle in Virginia via a war of continuous campaign, and Sherman would bring the war home to Southern civilians in something conceptually akin to modern total warfare in Georgia and the Carolinas.²

Civilians support war through agriculture and food production, communications, industry and other economic activity, and transportation. After taking Atlanta, Sherman’s plan was to cut a 60 mile-wide swath “to the sea,” to Savannah, wrecking bridges, factories, railroads, and telegraph lines with soldiers and “bummers” foraging off of the land, burning plantations, and freeing slaves and Union prisoners of war along the way. Sherman called it a “hard war.” But unlike later total war campaigns—like Nazi Germany’s Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in 1941—the object was not the extermination of civilians, but rather to bring the CSA to its knees by wrecking its infrastructure and making civilians no longer want to fight by making life miserable. “I can make this march,” Sherman said, “and make Georgia howl.” And he did.

The situation in eastern Ukraine in some ways also resembles the scene at Petersburg in late 1864 and early 1865, when the Army of the Potomac under Grant (technically under George Meade, but Grant, in charge of all Union forces, was headquartered with him) squared off against the Army of Northern Virginia under Lee. After the brutal Virginia Campaign of May and June 1864, the exhausted armies settled into a war of position that foreshadowed the “trenchlock” on the Western Front 50 years later. It was a war of attrition in which the side with the greater numbers and resources eventually won.

This appears to be what is happening in Ukraine: the stronger side has a mixed record on the battlefield, the weaker side has fought extremely well, and the war has settled into deadlock. Although a winter offensive is still possible, perhaps inevitable, Russia seems to also be opting for a Shermanesque hard war by reducing Ukraine’s infrastructure and making life dangerous and miserable for civilians. Although there have been atrocities on both sides, Russia appears to be pursuing the systematic destruction of Ukraine as a functioning nation and the grinding down of its army on the battlefield rather than a strategy based on the of annihilation of civilians. A strategy based on breaking the will of a nation’s home front is always dicey, but on the other hand, it is also less risky for the attacker than outright combat. It would also be a means for prosecuting the war while waiting-out the other side.

The relevant questions at this point are: 1). will the more limited offensive strategy work, and 2). is it merely a prelude for a more robust offensive in February and March?

Notes
1. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford University Press, 1985). See also Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010).
2. See James M. McPhereson, “From Limited War to Total War in America,” in On the Road to Modern War (Cambridge University Press, 1999) 297-309. See also Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press), 1985. For a general background of the grand strategies during the Civil War, see T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His General (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York: Charles L Webster and Company, 1885), and William T. Sherman, Memoirs (New York: Library of America, 1990 [1875]).