Author Archives: admin

By Michael F. Duggan

It was my own damned fault. Last night I watched the 2000 film Thirteen Days. When the world looks hopeless, I sometimes watch it or else pick up a biography of Franklin Roosevelt or George Marshall to remind myself that there was a time when there were good leaders in this nation and reasons for hope. I usually come away from Thirteen Days in a bittersweet mood reflecting on the promise and the loss of the Kennedy years and how a nuclear war was averted through crisis diplomacy.

As if the war in Ukraine is not worrisome enough, when I turned off the DVD player last night, I caught a news story about the two drones that were shot down over the Kremlin. It was like waking from an anxious dream in which disaster was avoided and into a nightmare where the threat of global catastrophe persists.

If the story of the drones is not keeping you up at night, you’re not paying close enough attention.

By Michael F. Duggan

A former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer has estimated that Ukrainian combat deaths to date might be 300,000 or more. He also observed that in this war of position—a war with an intensity beyond what most Americans can imagine, and which is reminiscent of the Western Front in WWI—the best of Ukrainian manhood is dying.  They have fought magnificently with courage, skill, and tenacity beyond all expectation.  The fact that they have gone toe-to-toe with Russia in a vicious conventional conflict is striking. But through no fault of their own, the balance of numbers and resources are against them. It is time to end this war.

From the start, there have been only four possibilities of how the war could end: 1). A Ukrainian defeat. 2). A stalemate—a frozen, festering war, an ossified war of position, that settles into a hot demilitarized zone that could reignite at any time. 3). A Russian or Western defeat after direct NATO intervention, followed by a nuclear war. 4). A settled peace.  No matter how unsatisfactory it might sound, the fourth possibility is the only sane option.

As things stand, the situation is only a few rounds of escalation short of a wider war, and Russia is moving nuclear weapons to Belarus.

By Michael F. Duggan

Yes, I know, it’s not really over.

Unlike popular wars, there are no parades and celebrations after pandemics. The COVID-19 virus is still among us; a couple hundred Americans still die from it every day, give or take, and the number of new infections is diminishing. The emergence of another killer strain of the disease sometime in the indefinite future is a possibility. But the worst of the great visitation is perhaps a year or more behind us. Gone are the days of refrigerator trucks serving as temporary morgues outside of large urban hospitals, and a mostly maskless status quo has quietly and unselfconsciously crept back. After so many months, “COVID fatigue” had set in, and it was to be expected.

The country is different now, altered by the disease. The pandemic drove the trend of working from home by orders of magnitude, and the number of Americans who no longer go to the office every day is at a level that would have taken decades to reach in more ordinary times. High school girls now attend class in pajamas and bedroom slippers. It is possible that the suit and tie (and the jacket and tie) is dead in all but the highest levels of professional life, and outside of the most special of occasions. On its face, this accelerated casualness looks like a chronic lack of effort. How are we to expect people to return to greater rigor after three years where solitude and diminished standards were the norm?

And then there are the casualties. There are young people who feel cheated out of milestone high school and college experiences, and we can only wonder what the long-term impact of the pandemic will be on those who were three to six years old at the height of the crisis, and were just becoming aware of the world and social interactions. There are the “long haulers” whose health may be permanently damaged by a virus whose symptoms ranged from none at all to a slow gasping death alone in tent-like hospital wards.

And of course there are the dead, 1,121,819 Americans by the latest court, and the real number might be much higher. That number is almost twice as great as the one for all of the U.S. combat deaths in all of our wars, given as 666, 441. In the same way that the country quickly forgot the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 and got on with the 1920s, or how we have never faced the Vietnam War with complete frankness, we are not acting like a country that has been through a world and national-historical tragedy of the largest proportions. We are not acting like a country that has just lost more than a million of our neighbors.

I suspect that there will be important histories written about the COVID-19 pandemic over the coming years and decades. But then, how many Americans really read history?

By Michael F. Duggan

Eulogy delivered at Arlington National Cemetery, April 24, 2023

I want to thank you all for being here.

I am glad that the weather has cooperated so magnificently. Outdoor events in the spring are always dicey matters.

There is a story about how President Eisenhower was asked to be the commencement speaker at Penn State in 1955.  His brother, Milton, was president of the university, and it was to be an outdoor graduation.  And as is so often the case in these latitudes in May, storm clouds were moving in from the west. The event planners were not sure what to do, and Milton asked his brother, the president, if he thought the ceremony should be moved indoors.

“You decide,” Eisenhower said, “the last time I worried about the weather was June 6, 1944.” The story is neither apocryphal nor is it fully true; he also worried about the weather in December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.

But it is a gorgeous day with no chance of storms, and I thank you for coming. My dad would have been honored to see this group assembled here today.

My father was a soldier, a combat infantry officer: West Point ’59, airborne, ranger, special forces.

He was born in the small hamlet of Paia on the island of Maui, Territory of Hawaii on August 20, 1936.  The son of teachers, his family moved to Oahu after the Pearl Harbor attacks—a formative event of his early life.  His father’s family is famine Irish by way of Ontario and North Dakota; his mother’s family, from Texas, goes back to Jamestown.

He graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1954 and attended the University of Hawaii for a year before being selected for the United States Military Academy at West Point, his brother, _____, had gone off to the Naval Academy at Annapolis a couple of years before.  And so, after 19 years of perfect weather, crystal blue seas, and palm trees, I suspect that the Academy and the winters of the Hudson highlands were a rude awakening.

But he graduated in 1959 and was commissioned into the infantry.  After completing the Airborne and Ranger courses, he married _____ _____ in New York City the day after Christmas, 1959.  We moved around a lot, and I lived in 10 houses and apartments by the time I was 9—the life of an Army family. But it was a wonderful upbringing, we lived and traveled throughout the US and took trips to Austria, Germany, England, and Scotland, and so, in the words of Jimmy Doolittle, “I could never have been so lucky again” (by the way, Doolittle is over in Section 7A of the cemetery, which I believe is that way).

My dad had a full career as an Army officer with progressive assignments in airborne infantry units.  He served two combat tours in the Republic of Vietnam.  A master parachutist, he jumped out of an airplane 104 times and participated in approximately 150 helicopter combat missions. 

In the 1970s, he commanded a Basic Combat Training battalion at Ft. Jackson, SC.  His career also included an early overseas tour in South Korea and an assignment with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, among others (he was the guy who briefed the Chairman of the JCS back when it was Creighton Abrams, namesake of the M-1 Abrams tank and the room that the reception will be in at Patton Hall).  He retired as a full “bird” colonel in 1985 after 25 years of service.

And his awards include the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars with V—”Valor”—device, a Purple Heart, and many others.

In terms of his professional life, there was a kind of military purity to him.  He was trained to be a career soldier at the tax-payers’ expense, he would tell me, and was skeptical about the “political guys.”   

After his military service, he began a second career as an Assistant and Deputy Director and lobbyist for the American Legion, where he prepared and presented testimony before House and Senate Armed Services Subcommittees in support of a variety of veterans’ issues.

One of these was the concurrent receipt of military retirement pay and veterans’ disability compensation which passed Congress in 2003-04. I think was his proudest post-Army accomplishment: he told me that they owed the veterans their retirement, and that the wounded had paid for their disability compensation with their blood.  He retired from The American Legion in 2007 with more than 20 years of service.

But as impressive as his service was—real accomplishments, involving great risk and sacrifice—all of this is also the stuff of resumes.  There is a saying that there are old soldiers who would rather show you their medals and those who prefer to show you their wounds. As it happens, he was perfectly happy to show you either or both.  He was proud of his service and made no secret about it.

And yet the outward signs, his medals, badges, and insignia, were not, I think, reflective of the biggest part of his character.

Shortly after he died, my mom began receiving sympathy cards and phone calls, some from relatives, friends, and classmates of course, but what was striking was that a number of them were from people she and I did not know—veterans and retired servicemen and servicewomen.  Some of the condolences were from veterans with PTSD, people who he had helped navigate the various veterans’ bureaucracies, and people he had helped get into programs, including twelve-step programs.

When I was cleaning out the trunk of his car, a man who I never met before, came up to me on the street and offered his heartfelt condolences and went on and on about how he had helped him. There were also the more recently-wounded veterans that he had met as a volunteer in wards at Walter Reed-Bethesda to whom he had spoken in a way that only someone who has been there can do.   

He also worked with the Maryland Department of Veterans Affairs helping those returning from Afghanistan and Iraq suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries—the signature wounds of those conflicts.  But he knew this stuff and was happy to help, both in a professional capacity and on his own time as a volunteer.

Many of us fly the flag on Memorial Day and Veterans Day.  Some people put “I support the troops” bumper-stickers on their cars.  But how many of us actually volunteer at veterans’ hospitals?  (I know that _____’s father volunteered at Bethesda and so did my sister when she was a teenager).  My dad did as well, as a kind of third act.  So, after a year in the Maryland V.A., he transferred to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda to work as a Red Cross volunteer, again, with veterans suffering from PTSD and TBI.

He was himself combat wounded, and if you have not been wounded, it is a community—a siblinghood—to which you can never belong.  I think that for a veteran, volunteering in a hospital ward of the combat wounded—as he did—it is a two-way street of healing, and I know that he especially valued this service and his Red Cross vest.   

But except for his vest, he gave little indication of his help to others.  My sense is that he saw it as a duty and it was probably too personal to mention. Medals and ribbons are conspicuous and there is a certain anonymity to the wearing them—they are symbols whose general meaning is inferred. They do not quite tell the full story.  But volunteering in a ward of the wounded is a quiet and personal duty.  

A few weeks before he died, he said that he admired my sister, _____, and that she tried harder than most people. Effort counted a lot with him, and it was sheer doggedness that had gotten him through West Point.  And he said that my mom was the love of his life.

Like all of us, he was full of ironies and contradictions: a soldier who had served two combat tours, he always seemed a little too concerned about his health.  He jumped out of airplanes for a living, and yet I could never coax him into go parasailing with me at Ocean City.  He also had a sense of humor that could be downright silly. For instance his favorite marching cadence at West Point had the sardonic refrain: “For it’s GI beans and GI gravy… gee I wish I joined the Navy.”

He was a soldier who loved Peter, Paul, and Mary, and tested my sister’s patience by playing Elton John CDs while driving to the beach.  Apparently Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was a particular favorite.

One of my earliest memories is of him standing in the doorway of our apartment in Queens New York one morning when I was three.  It was 1966 and he was leaving for Vietnam for the first time.  He told me in words I can hear now that I was “the man of the house.” 

But even at the age of three, I had no illusions. It was my mom who was the real CEO and the person who managed the finances, scheduled interstate moves every 10 to 12 months, took me and my sister to Rockaway Beach with my cousins, the _____, as well as to the American Museum of Natural History, Mets games, the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, and the movies, just to name a few things.  She magnificently ran the show day in and day out.  She also taught us how to be comfortable in any and all company.    

His favorite film was From Here to Eternity.  Set in Hawaii, it came out the year he graduated from high school.  As a young man, he looked a little like Montgomery Clift, and he internalized some of the film’s themes, like boxing.  He would go on to box at West Point, and taught me how to throw a punch and a football.  He ran three miles a day in combat jump boots—Corcorans—well into his 50s.  

He embraced the easily spoken but hard-lived values of duty, honor, and service, and the services he rendered, but about which he never spoke, of are in some ways the most admirable.  And there is something poetic about an old warrior who dies in peace after helping others as a second and third act. Ambulatory to the end, you could say he died with his Corcorans on.

He was away a lot when I was young. But he instilled in me a love of history, literature, and the outdoors.  It is because of him that I voluntarily chose to attend a military high school. It is no doubt because of him that I got my doctorate in US History; when he returned from Vietnam for the second time in the fall of 1969, he brought with him The Golden Book of the American Revolution (a book that is still on my shelf) and then, for my next birthday, I received the accompanying volume on the Civil War.  And so, at the age of six, I was hooked. 

He emphasized the importance of education and service to others, and was unendingly generous.  He had an abiding love of his family, the Hawaiian Islands (and Hawaiian shirts), West Point, Army football, grilled steaks, gardening, and old rock and roll music.

So aloha, Dad, and thanks for everything.  We love you.  “Well done, be thou at peace.”  

By Michael F. Duggan

The claim that if you want security you must give up liberty has become a mainstay of the revolt against freedom.  But nothing is less true.  There is, of course, no absolute security in life.  But what security can be attained depends on our own watchfulness, enforced by institutions to help us watch—i.e. by democratic institutions which are devised (using Platonic language) to enable the herd to watch, and to judge their watch-dogs.
-Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 636, n.62

We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissent)

Why do monopolies raise prices while decreasing portions and lowering the quality of ingredients, parts, and services? They do it for the same reason psychopaths do what they do: because they can.   

Governments, like businesses, are not moral or immoral.  Like an nonsocial organism in nature, they are amoral and are only as good as their people, ideology, laws, and actions; a nation is what a nation does, both good and bad.  They will do whatever they can within the law and sometimes well beyond it, limited only by the bounds of the possible.  Unrestrained, they may do what they can get away with, and all governments lie to their people in varying degrees.  They are a necessary evil (underscore both necessary and evil).  Given all of this, what will become of democracy and liberalism in a time when the state is able to follow most aspects of a citizen’s life simply because it can?

Consider the following story.  On July 12, 2012, a 10-year-old girl was walking home from a store with her 2-year-old brother in their South Philadelphia neighborhood.  As they walked by a parked car, a man got out and grabbed the girl, but she fought back and the boy screamed at the top of his lungs.  The man got nervous, got back into his car and drove off.  The whole thing was caught on a street camera and the video was widely circulated on television and on social media.  Realizing the hopelessness of his situation, the perpetrator turned himself in and is now serving 17-34 years in prison. 

Given what could have happened in this incident, it is impossible not to be pleased b they outcome.  Philadelphia Mayor, Michael Nutter, observed that the quick resolution to the case “demonstrates the power of getting information out or having good video.”  ABC news reported a police source admitting that the video “was the catalyst in breaking the case.”

That night I called a friend, a believer in the Fourth Amendment (another happy ending to come out of Philadelphia), and a critic of the surveillance state. I made the point that one could not argue with the results in this case.  His haunting reply cut to the heart of the matter: “Yes,” he said, “I suppose that there are some advantages to living in an authoritarian system.”  As it happens, street crime was not a major problem in Nazi Germany and in other nations under totalitarian regimes.  The question is how far in that direction should the citizens of a liberal republic be willing to go?

It is undeniable that surveillance technologies sometimes work in these kinds of cases and are useful in finding suspects after the fact.  No doubt they also provide a fair measure of deterrent value as well.  I am told that one cannot walk across downtown Washington, D.C. (or London, or New York City, or…) without being off-camera for more than a few seconds.  It turns out we are all TV stars.

But have we given away our privacy too easily?  One of the operating costs of a liberal republic is the higher crime rates that go along with people having the freedom to act on bad impulses.  Rights allow us to do all kinds of bad things. The First Amendment gives constitutional protection to a wide range of lies and deception.  On the other hand, the same technological revolution that wrought today’s surveillance technologies has also created powerful new criminal tools and provides the venues for their use.  It’s a cause-and-effect thing: technology helps create the problem and then provides solutions that come at a cost to our civic lives. 

Human nature may not change over historical time, but cyber technology has created an entire new cosmos for human venality; in all my years I was never robbed on the street, and yet people try to rip me off on the Internet or via robocalls every day (while editing this article, I was interrupted three times by automated calls from unfamiliar organizations).  What happens if security technology and our laws do not keep pace with technology-enabled crime in these dangerous new worlds?  The flip side of this question is: what becomes of a state that knows everything about its citizens?  Like the Vietnamese village of fifty-odd years ago, will a government destroy the foundations of liberal democracy in order to save it?

The cyber world has thus created a situation in which the very enforcement of the law may require the surrendering of privacy and rights.  On the other hand, where the law is not enforced, the law ceases to exist, and the most aggressive and opportunistic elements tend to take over (the later Roman Empire was flawed and corrupt, but by most standards, it was better than the early Middled Ages in much of Europe).         

Aggravating all of this is the fact that some of our national first principles are at odds with each other.  Equality and liberty, for instance: the more that equality is enforced, the less freedom; the more freedom, the less equality.  It is the same with freedom and security.  It is like a seesaw or a balance scale: the less that law is enforced, the more crime; the more the law is enforced, the less freedom.  The trick is to strike a tolerable, workable balance of rights and security.  And yet the power of the new technologies have forced situation of accepting a choice of either security or victimhood.  In the minds of many people addicted to their smartphones and other high tech face magnets, privacy and rights never enter into the equation.    

Even where security features are in place, safety is not guaranteed, and you may end up losing both your freedom and security.  All 19 of the September 11^th terrorists were caught on security cameras, and, although surveillance footage helped identify them after the attacks, they were still able to destroy the World Trade Center towers, hit the Pentagon, and kill everybody aboard Flight 93.  Likewise, the United States military could see every square inch of Afghanistan from space, and yet for 20 years Americans still came home in body bags before the Taliban took control of the country in 2021. 

Is the future one in which liberal democracy is replaced by a techno surveillance state as a lesser of evils in a dark Manichean world?  Are we already there?  The difference between Big Brother in the novel, 1984, and the estates of the modern surveillance state and its corporate allies—whether it is banks, businesses, and social media tracking your preferences and transactions via algorithms, local jurisdiction speed cameras, or a centralized government—is that Orwell could have never imagined the power of the technologies that watch or otherwise follow us today; Big Brother’s creepy, yet blandly attractive, know-it-all Little Sister, Alexa, is already a permanent guest in tens of millions of households.  But even this is small potatoes relative to what is already possible.  The level of surveillance in nations like China shocks the conscience. 

Some people shrug off these concerns with the argument: if I am not doing anything wrong, why should I care if intelligence or law enforcement agencies are watching me or accessing my DNA (and the related question: why shouldn’t the businesses and financial institutions I use know my preferences)?  The problem is that you might get a government you don’t like and who does not like you (and the businesses you patronize may share your information with less savory organizations).  If the past 7 years have shown us anything, it is the vulnerability of republics to illiberal demagogues and factions.  If an authoritarian government were to take over, it will be too late to change things.  It is probably too late already, given the power of today’s surveillance technologies and the amount of personal information out there.  And given human nature, if the technology exists, is will be used and abused.  

There is also a broader theoretical question here: at a certain level of technological development, does privacy, and therefore freedom—cornerstones of a liberal constitutional society—become impossible to sustain?  Although it is hard to know precisely what that tipping point is (and it may be well behind us), I suspect that the answer is yes: surveillance technologies will render liberal democracy a thing of the past. 

As with the private enforcement of local, state, and federal laws, and incarceration for corporate profit, domestic spying should never be condoned in a democracy, especially for profit.  Just as human misery should not be monetized, nor should private information.  These things are fundamentally harmful to the health of a liberal republic.  They are by their nature corrupting.  It is bad enough when a government continually spies on its own people, but to make such practices profitable not only cements them into place, it is also a long stride toward authoritarian rule.  Because the Internet has become such a pervasive part of our lives, it is easy to forget that one of its primary purposes is intelligence gathering against those of us who use it.    

Without law and the order it provides, there can be no freedom, privacy, or rights.  But things have gone too far, and we are like the frog in the parable that is slowly boiled to death as the heat is turned up gradually and without its noticing.  In writing this, I am reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s famous admonishment, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” And yet because of the scale and ubiquity of today’s technology, I suspect we are well beyond that in practical terms.  And with AI and quantum computing (and hacking) about to come into their own, I suspect that things could get much worse over the coming years (in which case, these may be the good old days). Even without these things, the post-liberal techno state is already upon us. 

By Michael F. Duggan

With so much attention focused on Bakhmut, it is easy to forget that the Ukrainian front is 600 miles long—roughly 125 miles longer that the Western Front in World War One—and that fighting is occurring at many points along that line. One of those places is a bulge around the town of Avdiivka.

Located few miles northwest of the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk, Avdiivka had a pre-2014 population of around 32,000, meaning that it is, or was, about half the size of Bakhmut. It is an industrial town notable for the Avdiivka Coke Plant, the largest of its kind in Ukraine. The salient around the town is immediately north of what was the Donetsk Sergei Prokofiev International Airport, destroyed in the 2014-15 fighting. It is about 56 miles south of Bakhmut.

Avdiivka saw heavy fighting in the Donbas War in eastern Ukraine beginning in 2014. It was captured by pro-Russian forces during the spring of 2014 and retaken by the Ukrainians that summer. The town was the site of a pitched battle in early 2017. Although Avdiivka is mostly destroyed, and most of its civilian population has left, its industrial significance and recent history explain much of its importance to both sides.

As with Bakhmut, the Russians may see it is a possible strategic gateway to points west. The attacks in and around Bakhmut and Avdiivka now appear to be prongs of their larger offensive. Their strategy seems to be focused on these two strong points with a goal of drawing Ukrainian units and resources from other sectors thus thinning out the long defensive line. If the defense of Bakhmut is any indication, the Ukrainian defenders of Avdiivka will fight with courage, skill, and tenacity.

There is also a large salient forming north of Bakhmut around the city of Sivers’k.

Postscript, February 15, 2024
The fall of Avdiivka now appears to be inevitable, and the grinding Russian offensive all along the line continues.

By Michael F. Duggan

Ninety years ago this past Monday, the newly inaugurated Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his first Fireside Chat, “The Banking Crisis.” Roosevelt would shepherd the nation through the Great Depression and give us Glass-Steagall and the FDIC and would reregulate the economy. The result was a quarter-century of unparalleled prosperity following the Second World War.

After the financial collapse of 2008 and the depression that followed (don’t let anybody tell you that it was a “great recession;” it is a depression that still persists in large swaths of the nation), we got the Dodd-Frank Act, which required that banks act responsible with your money. That act was repealed in 2018, and banks have apparently gone back to their old risky behavior. Now a number of banks have collapsed or are in trouble, and once again we are left wondering how far it will go.

How do you like deregulation now?

By Michael F. Duggan

In previous postings, I conjectured that the fight for Bakhmut would be a hybrid of a grinding Western Front offensive of the First World War, and an Eastern Front encirclement offensive of the Second World War. I stand my this assessment, but would like to clarify the former part of my prediction.

During World War One, there were two primary kinds of offensives. There were attrition offensives, like the German attack at Verdun and the resulting battled that lasted from February 21, 1916 to December 18, 1916, and there were attempted breakthroughs, like the British Somme Offensive of July 1, 1916 to November 18, 1916, and the German Spring Offensive of March 21-July 18, 1918 (there were also diversionary attacks that sometimes turned into major actions in their own right). The Battle of Bakhmut, with its slow, grinding character, appears to have the qualities of an attrition offensive with the likely goal of a breakthrough, thus making it a hybrid of both kinds of Great War offensives (it may also divert attention and resources from other parts of the front).

There is something obscene to the logic of attrition, where the goal is to outlast the enemy by maximizing their casualties, and turning salients into kill zones. As with Verdun, the attackers at Bakhmut know that the defenders, who have shown incredible courage and skill, will hold out as long as possible, and that they may choose death over withdrawal or surrender. This is the danger implicit in defending a position of great symbolic importance, and one wonders why the Ukrainians don’t fall back to prepared positions west of the town (like the German Hindenburg Line of 1917). As it is, a hole in the line at Bakhmut could open up the rest of the Donetsk Oblast to the Russians. It might allow them to roll up the rest of the line. It might do both. It might do neither. Although the tide of war appears to be favoring the Russians at this point, nothing is certain in war, and it is possible that a war of position and stalemate will persist regardless of which way the battle goes.

What we do know is that Russian gains in and around Bakhmut can be measured in terms of yards. We can speculate that, like a grinding First World War offensive, both sides are taking horrendous casualties. The question is the degree to which the outcome will be strategic or symbolic or both and what will follow.

By Michael F. Duggan

Watch Bakhmit. Some of the most significant battles of the World Wars involved salients, promontories jutting into enemy territory, and this may prove to be the case in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

The first large-scale offensive of the independent American Expeditionary Force in the First World War was launched at the St. Mihiel salient in September 1918.  In December 1944, an unexpected German offensive created a burgeoning “bulge” in the Allied lines in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, France, and Luxemburg.  You destroy salients by nipping them off at the base combined with direct assaults elsewhere.  In both cases, these salients were reduced in part by coordinate attacks on either side at the point where the bulge joined the line (the Germans were withdrawing from St. Mihiel at the time of the American attack, so the task for the U.S. forces was perhaps less costly than it might have otherwise been).

The Bakhmut salient is somewhat different from these historical examples. Rather than denoting a previously quiet sector (like St. Michiel and Verdun) or a the result of surprise offensive (like the Ardennes) into Russian-held territory, the protruding nature of the Bakhmut salient is the result of Russian pincer movements on either side of the city, an encirclement conducted largely by the Wagner Group (whose December strength of around 50,000 is the approximate equivalent of two corps). Following the fall of nearby Soledar in mid-January, it has been the result of ongoing Russian attacks and the magnificent defense of the small city by Ukrainian forces (the town has been under fire since the middle of last May).  The Russian goal is to presumably cut it off, force its surrender, or destroy it outright as an enemy pocket.  The strategy appears to be one that was favored initially by the Wehrmacht and then the Soviets on the Eastern Front during WWII.   

During the second half of the war, the Soviets became expert in large-scale pincer movements: pin down the enemy in the front, encircle on both sides, and then close the circle or wait for its defenders to capitulate.  The Eastern Front moved westward by a series of these battles, some of them in Ukraine.  It became the signature operational strategy of the Red Army, and some of these actions were among the largest and most costly battles in history. The Germans never developed an effective counterstrategy to this approach, and encircled areas became kill zones before being completely reduced. The present offensive around Bakhmut has the characteristics of a WWII pincer/encirclement offensive and a slow, grinding WWI offensive with gains measured in meters. To date the casualty rates are supposed to have been horrendous.

In a war that is going well, encircled units may be relieved before destruction.  This was the case of the 101^st Airborne Division at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge (the Screaming Eagles were surrounded within an enemy salient that was quickly reduced). If relief or withdrawal are not possible, encircled units,—besieged and cut off from supply lines—have three choices: a fighting breakout to the rear, surrender, or destruction.  On the Eastern Front, the Soviets used combined arms attacks supported by massed rocket artillery, Katyushas—the horrifying, shrieking area weapons that the Germans called “Stalin’s organ”—to reduce encircled sectors.  If the present Russian offensive grinds on, as it is expected to do, and an orderly withdrawal from the area becomes impossible, then these three options may become the only choices left for the Ukrainian defenders of Bakhmut. If the town falls, it could spell disaster for the side that fought so well to defend it. The best option therefore, may be to abandon the city and fall back to stronger defensive positions, as the Russians themselves did at Kherson.  

Although the Russians will press their offensive at multiple points along the front, the town is seen by both sides as a linchpin of the war. Russia and Ukraine are both committing massive resources to the fight. Why?  Except for the fact that it is an administrative center—perhaps the equivalent of an important county (raion) seat (with a prewar population around 71,000, it is slightly larger than Rockville, Maryland)—in a salt mining area and a crossroads town (like Borodino, Gettysburg, and Bastogne), what is its strategic importance? 

From what I understand—and accurate information is hard to come by—both sides may consider the town to be the gateway to western (i.e. unoccupied) Donetsk.  Taking Bakhmut would therefore allow the Russians to move on the larger cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk and securing the rest of the Donetsk oblast. Some commentators have speculated that a Russian victory at Bakhmut could mark the beginning of the end of the war—a latter-day Stalingrad on a smaller scale. But again, it is hard to tell. At least one observer (Scott Ritter) has pointed out that Bakhmut is a strategic strong point in the line. Thus the Russians appear to be violating the Napoleonic precept to avoid an enemy in a prepared position. If the Russians do break through there, it is difficult to say how the U.S. and NATO would respond, but it might signal a new and extremely dangerous phase of the war.  The town has also become an important symbol for the brave Ukrainian resistance, and winning there appears to have become a matter of national pride for both sides.  Casualties are supposed to be horrendous. It is a microcosm of the war.

Postscript, May 13, 2023
Over the past few days, Ukrainian forces have made gains to the immediate north and south of the Bakhmut salient. The Russian strategy of the past few months now appears to have been similar to that of the Soviets at Stalingrad: to bleed the other side white.  

Postscript, May 21, 2023
Russian sources are reporting that Bakhmut has fallen.

By Michael F. Duggan

By June 1864, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was tired of war. The 23-year-old brevet colonel, formerly of the Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, had twice been shot within an inch of his life—through the chest at Ball’s Bluff on the Potomac near Leesburg, Virginia, and through the neck at Antietam—and almost lost his foot to a ball from a Confederate canister shell at Chancellorsville. He had seen many of his friends killed or wounded in the war (Holmes was convalescing in Boston during the battle of Gettysburg, where the 20th would lose 10 of its 13 officers, killed and wounded). In almost four years of fighting, 20th suffered 409 killed, the fifth highest number of casualties of all regiment units in the Union Army.

In January 1864, Holmes was made aide-de-camp to General Horatio Wright of the second division in the Union’s VI Corps (Wright would become corps commander on May 12). His job as a staff officer turned out to be almost as dangerous as that of a combat officer, and he was frequently on the firing line. By late spring, with his period of service nearly up, Holmes decided that he had had enough.

More than anything, it appears to have been Grant’s Virginia Overland Campaign of May and June that got to him. On May 11, Holmes wrote to his mother “Today is the 7th day we have fought, not pitched battles all of the time of course, but averaging a loss I guess of 3,000 a day at least.”¹ In six weeks, the Army of the Potomac would lose just under 55,000 men. Holmes would muster out at Fort Stevens in Washington, D.C. on July 17, 1864. He had more than done his share and would go on to become the greatest legal thinkers in U.S. History and our greatest Supreme Court Justice.

With 110,000 men, Grant realized that he could sustain twice as many casualties as Lee (with 60,000-65,000 men) and still win the war. Union battlefield defeats—although significant—were secondary relative to the overall strategy of destroying Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The idea was to latch on to Lee like a bulldog and not let go. In spite of significant losses at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, the greater numbers of the Union Army ultimately prevailed. One hundred seven years ago this Tuesday, the Imperial German Army attack Verdun, knowing that the French would defend it to the last man. Such is the hideous logic of attrition.

The population of Ukraine is now estimated to be below 37 million, and is perhaps far lower. The population of Russia is around 145 million, almost four times as large, with a traditional industrial/extractive economy capable of autarchy and supporting a war effort indefinitely. If Russia’s offensive takes on the slow, grinding character of a 19th or early 20th century offensive with modern weaponry, as it it expected to do, it seems likely that even with heavy casualties, they will win.

When I think of a war of attrition, it is the Western Front of the First World War that comes to mind. It was a tragedy—a catastrophe. But it was also a crime. The politicians on both sides knew what was happening in Flanders and Picardy. The final campaigns of the Civil War were judged to be necessary measures in what had become an existential war. By the end of the war, the South was in ruins but would eventually win the peace after the failure of Reconstruction in 1878. Grant was called a “butcher” by some. We can infer that the war in Ukraine is heading into a particularly destructive phase and one that could easily morph into a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. Larger numbers are not always the determining factor of a war, but in Ukraine, they may be suggestive (and some independent Western sources are reporting that Russian losses to date may be considerably lower than the numbers reported by the mainstream media). If the war remains limited to Ukraine and Russia, the side with the greater numbers will likely prevail. The other alternative is a festering war of position.

At this point, the only position for a rational person is one favoring peace talks.

Note
1. Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., Touched with Fire, Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 114.