Russia’s Rebound: How Moscow Has Partly Recovered From Its Military Setbacks

By Barry R. Posen, Foreign Affairs, January 4, 2023

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“All the dumb Russians are dead.” So said Ukrainian officials in July 2022 as they sought to explain why the Russian army had abandoned the overambitious strategy and amateurish tactics that defined its conduct in the early weeks of the war. It was probably too early to make this quip. The Russians continued to do many dumb things and, indeed, still do. But broadly speaking, the Ukrainians’ intuition in the summer now appears correct: when it comes to overall military strategy, Moscow seems to have gotten smarter.

Russian strategic decisions are finally starting to make military sense. The partial mobilization of reservists that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered in September has strengthened Russian forces at the front. The bombing campaign against Ukrainian energy infrastructure that began in October is forcing Ukraine and its allies to divert resources toward the defense of the country’s urban population, vulnerable to bitter winter weather in the absence of electricity. And the withdrawal of Russian forces from the city of Kherson in November has saved capable units from destruction and freed them for action elsewhere.

In July, I argued that the war was stalemated. Given Ukraine’s subsequent successes in liberating territory in and around the cities of Kherson and Kharkiv, my assessment was clearly premature. But it is worth noting that Ukraine achieved these successes during the period in which Russia’s forces were at their weakest and its leadership was at its poorest. Despite Kyiv’s advances, the grim truth remains that then and now, the ratio of Russian casualties to Ukrainian casualties stands at one to one, according to U.S. estimates.

This is not a war that is simply cascading in Ukraine’s favor. Rather, it is turning into a war of attrition, a contest in which any gains by either side will come only at great cost. Even the dim outlines of this future should make both Ukraine and Russia wish to avoid it, but neither country seems ready to negotiate, much less make the difficult compromises that might provide the ingredients of a settlement.

Ukraine and its backers may hope that Russia comes to its senses and simply abandons the war, but that outcome looks unlikely. They may also hope for a Russian collapse at the front or at home, but the chances of either scenario are also slim. The most promising course would be for the United States to nudge the two sides to the negotiating table, since only Washington has the power to do so. But it has decided not to do so. And so the war goes on, at a tragic human cost.

FRESH FORCES

Putin’s initial plan—to overthrow the Ukrainian government in a raid by special operations and airborne forces—failed spectacularly. The Russians tried to salvage the campaign by moving large numbers of tanks, artillery, infantry, and supporting troops overland, but that effort fared little better in the face of constant Ukrainian ambushes.

As Putin’s hopes for a quick and easy victory vanished on the battlefield, losses on both sides mounted. Calculating casualty figures is hard. The U.S. intelligence community has released estimates that put the number of total casualties at 100,000 for the Russians and 100,000 for the Ukrainians. It is not clear how these numbers are derived, but on the Ukrainian side, they are roughly consistent with the 13,000 military deaths that Ukrainian officials state their army has suffered and track with the ratio of dead to wounded that U.S. forces experienced in Iraq. If one uses the ratio that U.S. forces experienced in the European theater of World War II, the number of Ukrainian casualties is probably closer to 50,000. Given U.S. officials’ view that casualties have been roughly comparable, Russian losses should lie in the same range: 50,000 to 100,000 casualties.

Since most casualties fall in combat units, for both Ukraine and Russia, this estimate would mean that each army has lost to death or injury nearly as many combat soldiers as it fielded at the beginning of the war. True, the lightly wounded may have returned to the front or will do so soon. But even if that factor effectively erases half of each side’s losses, each side has still permanently lost half the initial personnel in its tank and infantry battalions—a major reduction in combat power.

To restore that power, both Ukraine and Russia scrambled to refill their ranks. Ukraine managed to replenish its army relatively effectively. Part of its advantage came from the tens of thousands of Ukrainians who, eager to defend their country, volunteered for combat in those early months. But it is likely that Ukraine’s real ace in the hole was the tens of thousands of experienced veterans who had fought in the Donbas since 2014 and were drawn into the Ukrainian army’s reserve structure once they completed their initial period of duty. Many of them were used to bring Ukraine’s initial forces up to full strength at the time of the invasion, but some probably remained available to serve as replacements for killed and wounded soldiers as the months went on.

In the race to make up for battlefield casualties, Russia had a distinct disadvantage because Putin had sent his best forces to Ukraine. For the initial phase of the invasion, the Russian military appears to have committed about half of its major formations—some 40 brigades. It is likely that those 40 brigades included most of Russia’s experienced soldiers. Most Russian combat units feature a large number of drafted troops serving alongside professional troops, but Putin had insisted that no conscripts be sent to the front. By necessity, then, the 40-odd brigades left behind were denuded of their best-trained personnel.

The hodgepodge replacement force that Russia scrounged up in the early summer failed badly on the battlefield. Russian units became weaker and weaker, and Russian commanders had to rob forces from one part of the front to reinforce other parts. The Ukrainians pounced, taking advantage of thin Russian defenses, particularly in Kharkiv, to liberate more territory in their impressive drive in early September. Putin realized that he needed more troops.

Hence his order to mobilize Russian reservists announced in late September. For all the anecdotes about inexperienced recruits, substandard barracks, inadequate equipment, and limited training, the mobilization seems to be a reasonable response to the Russian army’s operational and tactical problems. Russia has announced a target of 300,000 additional troops, and the math adds up. The army needs 200,000 new soldiers to bring the 40 brigades that were left behind in Russia back to full strength, plus 100,000 to make up for the troops killed or wounded in battle.

Although some mobilized Russian reservists may have no military skills, many likely do. Even before the invasion, the Russian military was training some 250,000 conscripts every year and sending them back to civilian life. The mobilization surely found many of these men. Admittedly, to avert immediate disaster, Russia has been sending to the front a mix of the trained and untrained, the competent and incompetent, without much refresher training. But some 200,000 troops are receiving more substantial training in Russia and Belarus.

U.S. intelligence agencies are no doubt doing what they can to figure out whether this effort is serious. In 1982, an interagency intelligence memorandum concluded that the Soviets could mobilize reservists, retrain them, and be ready for offensive operations in roughly a month. If today’s Russian training effort is more than mere theater—building in extra time to account for the fact that the Russian army is in worse shape than its Soviet predecessor—40 fresh and moderately well-trained brigades should be ready for combat within several months. What the Russians will do with these forces remains to be seen. At a minimum, these brigades will stiffen the defense at the front and significantly raise the cost of Ukrainian efforts to recover their land in the four districts that Russia has claimed. They might even be used to renew the offensive, although given the strength and determination that the Ukrainian military has demonstrated, such a move would be unwise.

A SMART RETREAT

Like the mobilization, Russia’s withdrawal from the city of Kherson in November made military sense. As Putin himself observed, the line of contact between Russian and Ukrainian forces was long, stretching nearly 1,000 miles, and Russian forces were spread thin. Ukraine’s successful breakthrough in Kharkiv in September shortened the front that Russia had to defend to roughly 600 miles. But even that was not short enough. Russian forces had their necks stuck out on the west side of the Dnieper River at Kherson. The intelligent decision militarily was to withdraw them, and after much vacillation and considerable Ukrainian military pressure, that was exactly what Russia did. That Putin was willing to do something that he clearly did not wish to do suggests that he now has some confidence in his commanders—and that some of them are giving sound military advice.

There is no denying that the Russians were forced to retreat, and the mere fact that they had to do so no doubt upset Putin. But the Russians pulled off one of the hardest military operations: retreating during a major attack without suffering the disintegration or annihilation of their forces. It was no small feat to move some 20,000 soldiers and most of their combat equipment across the Dnieper after Ukrainian forces had destroyed key bridges. And even while under intense intelligence surveillance by the West and Ukraine, they managed to maintain the element of surprise. Up to the end, no one in Ukraine or in NATO seemed to be quite sure that Russian forces were leaving. Their rear-guard units maintained a coherent defense, even though they must have known that their comrades closer to the river were escaping.

Somehow, the Russians managed to repair damaged bridges while under fire, throw up pontoon bridges, and employ ferries to get their people and equipment out, defending each avenue of escape from Ukrainian attack. The Ukrainian army will now have to fight these units somewhere else, perhaps under less favorable conditions. If only through a Darwinian process, the Russian army has at last found some competent planners and battlefield commanders.

By all accounts, the Russians are settling in to defend the shorter front that their tactical defeats and retreats have produced—and doing so with newly reinforced combat units. According to press reports and satellite imagery, Russian troops are digging defensive positions all along the line of contact and constructing sequential barriers of concrete obstacles and bunkers. They are also presumably seeding the ground with mines, a simple and time-honored weapon of the Russian military. More fully manned units on shorter fronts and well-prepared defensive positions are the ingredients of a potentially effective defense. Unless Russian military morale truly collapses and produces mass mutinies and desertions, the Ukrainians will have to undertake the bloody work of evicting those units from their new positions.

BOMBING TO WIN?

Finally, the Russians have launched a cunningly effective bombing campaign against Ukraine’s electricity generation, transmission, and distribution system. The strikes against Ukraine’s electrical grid are particularly effective—and not just because they could turn the winter into a brutal struggle for survival for Ukrainian civilians. This campaign has not proved decisive so far, but like most strategic bombing campaigns, it imposes direct and indirect military costs.

Modern military systems for air defense, command and control, and intelligence gathering run on electricity, and if they cannot get it from the grid, they must get it from generators. But making that transition is not as easy as flipping a switch, and it can degrade these systems’ performance. Moreover, relying on generators places additional demands for fuel on the Ukraine’s military logistics system. The heat signatures produced by generators, meanwhile, add yet another data point that Russian intelligence can use to produce a more accurate picture of Ukrainian forces.

Russia’s bombing campaign also imposes opportunity costs: the Ukrainians must expend resources to adapt to the attacks, and already they have made defending electricity infrastructure from airstrikes a military and diplomatic priority. The country’s substantial weapons and ammunition industry depends on electricity, as does much of the rail system that moves war materiel around the country. With a damaged electricity grid, Ukraine’s soldiers and civilians will have to rely more on diesel-powered trains and diesel generators or shift to generators powered by scarce natural gas. These exigencies will divert still more fuel that could otherwise have been used for military operations, or they will simply impose more costs on Ukraine’s allies, which will need to deliver the fuel. The West is helping Ukraine repair the grid as best it can while under constant attack. But from the Russian perspective, this is good news, as the repairs consume resources that cannot be used to support fighting at the front.

The most alarming thing about Russia’s bombing campaign is that Moscow knows what it is doing. The Russians are hitting a small number of targets with relatively few weapons and producing disproportionate effects. Even though U.S. and British officials have regularly predicted that the Russian military would exhaust its supply of munitions, it has evidently found them somewhere. Russia’s well-executed campaign suggests that its air force, which has so far had little success when it comes to attacking Ukraine’s ground forces, has learned from its past mistakes.

NO END IN SIGHT

Moscow now seems reconciled to a simple war aim: to hold on to the land it has seized. And it appears to have settled on two new military strategies to pursue this objective. The first, as exemplified by the retreat from Kherson, the mobilization of reservists, and the construction of new barriers, is to create a dense defense and make the Ukrainians pay dearly for every effort to recover territory. The second, as exemplified by the bombing campaign, is to exploit the vulnerability of Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure to divert resources from the Ukrainian war effort at the front while making continuation of the war painful for Ukrainian society and ever more costly for allies.

Putin may hope that this approach ultimately brings Ukraine to the bargaining table. Or he may simply hope that the never-ending costs will cause Ukraine to gradually cease its attacks without conceding anything, resulting in another frozen conflict. Very few people know what Russia’s overall war strategy is, if it even has one. It is also possible that the recent period of reasonable military decisions and competent implementation will turn out to be a blip rather than a harbinger. The most mysterious question now is whether Russia’s efforts to train large numbers of combat capable units will work. And it is an open question whether Moscow has, or can manufacture or import, the weapons and ammunition needed for another year of intense combat. But if it can generate these new units and continue to fight sensibly, the war may continue in its present form: a brutal slugfest.

Russia’s war appears to have morphed from a regime change into a land grab. If the Kremlin can continue to make military decisions that are merely sensible and act on them in ways that are merely competent, a year from now, Western intelligence agencies may be counting another 50,000 to 100,000 casualties for each side, and Western legislatures may be debating another $100 billion of economic and military assistance for Ukraine. For now, diplomacy has little chance of altering this trajectory because both sides are so politically invested in the war. Each thinks that victory is possible and defeat unthinkable.

If it wanted to, the United States could develop a diplomatic strategy to reduce maximalist thinking in both Ukraine and Russia. But to date, it has shown little interest in using its leverage to even try to coax the two sides to the negotiating table. Those of us in the West who recommend such a diplomatic effort are regularly shouted down. If this bloody, costly, and risky stalemate continues for another year, perhaps that will change.

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Citation: Barry R. Posen, "Russia’s Rebound: How Moscow Has Partly Recovered From Its Military Setbacks," Foreign Affairs, 04 January 2023.

The Left and the Military

by Charles Knight, Dissent, Fall 1994

    The American left has proved very adept at identifying and opposing the misuse of American military power and the distortion of national priorities that defense spending has entailed. 

    Despite the left's consistent attention to military matters, it lacks a coherent approach to military policy. Mostly, the left has an inclination toward military issues -- and that inclination has been fairly consistently anti-military. This does not preclude banging the drum occasionally for select interventions. But it does mean that whenever the left relates to military policy, it relates as an outsider; it relates as though the realm of military policy is unremittingly hostile to progressive values. This article will argue that a positive progressive military policy is both possible and necessary -- necessary both to achieve progressive goals and to the credibility of the left in American politics.

    

    This article takes as a premise that there are instances in which a resort to military force is justified and that the problem of war does not arise solely or ultimately from the policies of any single state or group of states. Instead, the most fundamental of conditions that contribute to the occurrence of war is the anarchic international system in which states are free to pursue or defend their perceived interests by means of military force. Within this system, all states, big and small, have some degree of basic insecurity. 

    

    This article also assumes that the mere existence of "mitigating factors" cannot excuse aggression, or strip a nation of its right to self-defense, or relieve a group of nations of the moral responsibility to aid victims of aggression. Hence, in this view, it would have been proper for the United States, France, and England to come to the aid of Poland when it was attacked by Nazi Germany even though the Polish regime was at the time a dictatorship and even though the US, France, and England were far short of benevolent in their international relations.
    

    All of these assumptions are debatable, especially from the perspectives of pacifism and some types of anti-imperialism. However, this article will not argue these assumptions. Readers who are willing to entertain them may find value in what follows; those who are not may be in for a vexing ride. Either way, the point of posing these assumptions is not to write progressive politics out of the realm of military policy, but rather to write them in.    This article argues that the intricacies of military policy offer ample and fruitful opportunities for applying progressive perspectives.
    

    A telling illustration of the loss when progressive politics remains outside the military policy debate can be found in the 1992 national military strategy, drafted under the direction of  Colin Powell while serving under George Bush. The Clinton Pentagon has made only minor changes to date. 
    

    Although the national strategy makes passing reference to the importance of multinational alliances and UN mandates, it is fundamentally a unilateral strategy. By calling for the capacity to fight two major wars without reliance on significant allied and coalitional help, the strategy resulted in a requirement for very large US forces. Setting goals of extraordinarily quick, decisive victory, requires an emphasis on active duty forces and massive strategic lift.
    

    National strategies, by design, are very general statements, allowing for flexible interpretation. But they also set the framework for debate on most aspects of military policy. Before he released his "Bottom-Up Review" of military requirements last year, Les Aspin floated the idea of a "win-hold-win" sequencing of the two-war strategy. This strategic formulation was reflective of the low probabilities of two concurrent wars and suggestive of the wide latitude for slowing the pace of the wars should they occur. It could have had real meaning in derivative force sizes and composition. However, Aspin was immediately attacked from the right, and he retreated to a formula of "fighting and winning two wars near simultaneously."
    

    Defensive wars are almost always fought in a "hold-win" sequence; the allied strategy in WWII is a prominent 20th Century example. Seeking the capacity for an early offensive "win" option in two theaters is radically ambitious and extravagant. One measure of this ambition is the current plans to deploy a force of nearly five Army divisions anywhere in the world in eight weeks. Operation Desert Storm was the fastest large-scale logistics feat in history; it took twelve weeks to deploy the Desert Storm force. The new strategy seeks to best that by one-third.  
    

    Given the low level of objective threats to US interests in the post-cold war world and mindful of the other high-priority national needs, there is a large area of reasonable strategy options for the left to counterpoise. The left, however, remains conspicuously absent from the policy discussion. By default, conservatives with their allies in the military have controlled a soporific public debate about the great question of what post-cold war national strategy should be.

Toward a Progressive Military Policy

    Several goals would distinguish a progressive military policy. The first is an effort to effect structural guarantees that armed forces will be properly used, with restraint and for truly defensive ends. Second, is an effort to ensure that the requirement of a well-provisioned and well-functioning military is met in ways consistent with progress toward other positive national goals -- such as fiscal responsibility and the funding of human needs. Finally, a progressive military policy would aim to meet today's defense needs in ways that help create global conditions in which nations can confidently attempt a general demilitarization.
    

    The left has often stood ready to restrain military power, cut military spending, and support the evolution of alternative global and nonmilitary security mechanisms. The point here, however, is that progress toward these ends (1) requires a comprehensive engagement with military policy, and (2) cannot be achieved apart from an effort to ensure that the military remains able to fulfill the fundamental function of deterring and defeating aggression targetted at the United States.
    

    The US military is a very large, multipurpose, and complex institution. The set of policies applicable to it is correspondingly large and complex, covering issues of national military strategy, doctrine, operational concepts, force size, force structure, roles, missions, military modernization, and personnel. This article will not attempt to review the breadth of military policy, but instead, examine several policy debates and options that illustrate the importance and potential of a progressive intervention in military policy.
   

     There is no tradition in the American left of discussing military structure, doctrine, roles, and missions -- although it is at this level of discourse that military capabilities and budgets are determined. Left opposition to military priorities has most often been expressed as a consistent opposition to new weapon purchases. This may be because Congress, which has the responsibility for provisioning the armed forces, is the branch of the federal government most open to the left's influence. However, without a comprehensive vision of how a military should operate, budget-cutting arguments can only muster issues of cost and performance and remain fundamentally weak. Worse yet, applied with the type of determination necessary to achieve very substantial savings, they can give the appearance of a lack of concern for the lives of American soldiers and the security of the nation.
    

    As suggested above, a truly effective effort to achieve any positive end in the realm of military policy must respect this area of policy as an integrated whole. Two current issues illustrate this point: 

• the question of "active-reserve mix" in the US military; 

• and the debate over armed forces roles and missions.

The Future of America's Armed Forces Reserves

    Only recently has the US maintained large professional standing armies in peacetime. After WWII, large Soviet forces remained in Eastern Europe. To offer credible support for the defense of Western Europe, the US needed large active duty forces that could move into combat in days and weeks and not the months it would take to mobilize and deploy reserve forces. The dissolution of the Soviet threat makes it reasonable to transfer a significant portion of the force structure to the reserves. Nonetheless, current planning keeps the active force component at nearly the same proportion as during the Cold War; it will move down only three percent from its 1990 level of 65%.
    

    The proponents of large active forces who now dominate policymaking argue that the reserves are well suited to support and service missions, but are not prepared for combat maneuver missions if they must be deployed in the first several months of a crisis. The underlying planning assumption is that large combat forces must be ready to go on the offensive early in a future war. However, in the new threat environment, even significantly smaller active forces can hold a defensive line until reserves are ready to deploy. Given current geostrategic conditions, there is no good reason to accelerate war plans to the extent that they preclude greater reliance on reserves.
    

    The continuing emphasis on active duty forces is flawed and dangerous. In opposition to this, there is an opportunity to speak out for the ideal of a citizen's army or militia - in today's form, the National Guard and other service reserves. Putting more of the US force structure in reserves would not only save tens of billions of dollars a year, it would also put a democratic constraint on the capacity of political leaders to go to war without the backing of the American people. In other words, a greater reliance on the Reserves would serve the goals of both economy and democracy.

The Roles and Mission Debate

    Closely related to the issue of active-reserve "force mix" is the issue of armed forces roles and missions. This generally refers to the allocation of combat tasks, objectives, and responsibilities among the various service branches or their subordinate units. Defining roles and missions is particularly important in evaluating structural redundancies among the services.
    

    While progressives have remained fixated on achieving savings by challenging the cost-effectiveness of individual weapon systems, they pay far less attention to the much larger problem of structural redundancy among the services. Emblematic of this problem is the existence of four US air forces. In his 1993 review of roles and missions, General Colin Powell used a semantic distinction to dismiss the issue, stating that "America has one air force -- the US Air Force... other services have aviation arms." But few nations have air forces as large as the "aviation arms" of the US Navy and Marine Corps. And few nations have armies as large as America's second army -- the Marine Corps.
    

    Behind the problem of redundancy is the issue of service autonomy and rivalry. Being a good chairman, General Powell sought to close an issue that could set off a revolt of generals and admirals. From the perspective of national interest, however, a continuation of the status quo has nothing to do with maintaining a quality fighting force and everything to do with squandering scarce resources. Addressing the problems of service autonomy, rivalry, and redundancy would simultaneously serve the goals of lowering defense expenditures and fielding an effective fighting force. It also opens avenues to debate national strategy and the proper use of military forces.

Multinational Operations and the Future Role of the UN

    When and how military forces are used is the area of military policy that stimulates the greatest interest on the left. But the left response has been largely reactive and almost always negative, usually denying a positive role for US military power in the world. Many on the left, however, admit exceptions: the Second World War, or, currently, intervention in Bosnia or Haiti. Suppose indeed there are, from a progressive perspective, instances when the resort to military action is justified. In that case, it is incumbent on the left to join the debate on when and how military forces should be used.

    Today that debate is more open than at any time in recent history. The Gulf War marked a new, although fragile, precedent for large-scale US interventions. Despite the continuing preference of US leaders for the freedom of unilateral action, the fact of America's declining economic power and global trends toward interdependent international relations makes multilateralism an increasingly attractive norm in the post-cold war era. This will mean that the US will try to organize coalitions or rely on alliances to pursue large-scale interventions.

    Acknowledging the obvious problems of big power dominance in emerging multilateralism is a positive direction for US foreign policy. With more countries involved in coalition decision-making, war objectives will likely be more limited and the frequency of large-scale intervention lower. Through the practice of multilateralism, norms of intervention and coalition warfare will develop. However, at first, these will not be codified as law or applied with equanimity. Nevertheless, a process that moves beyond the singular prerogative of US power toward global norms of acceptable interstate behavior represents progress and a significant opening for the left.
    

    The next level of development of a responsible global security apparatus may be the creation of a multinational "peacemaking" force under UN command. However, the UN is today far from ready to assume and perform well in the type of role that would mark a qualitative advance toward dependable international stability and peace. And most nations are not yet prepared to cede such a role to the UN; A host of serious practical problems contribute to blocking consensus on moving forward. Unless the practical issues are addressed, the prospects for a significant global peacemaking force will quickly wither under a barrage of "realist" skepticism.
    

    Among the problems facing a UN command are issues of command and control, doctrine, division of labor, and interoperability among diverse national armed forces. Would a UN force that is truly multinational, both in composition and command, prove able to act in an efficient, effective, and timely fashion? An affirmative answer is possible, but it depends on deepening the discussion of organizational and operational issues.
    

    So far, the "realist" and "unilateralist" opposition to UN development has monopolized the discussion of these issues. Progressives, by contrast, have been badly overtaken by events. Although often supportive of nations' greater reliance on the UN, the left has been unable to address substantively many of the practical problems that recent experience has revealed.

Defensive Restructuring

    In international relations theory, the security dilemma posits that measures to improve one nation's security will tend to diminish another's security. This is particularly true if nation A's defense strategy calls for a retaliatory offensive against the territory and assets of nation B. Strong offensive capabilities may make nation A feel more secure, but it will make nation B feel less secure, with a number of undesirable consequences:
1) interstate tensions will increase if nation B reciprocates with an offensive strategy of its own;
2) military instability will grow as disproportionate investments in offensive capabilities make the defenses of both nations less reliable; and
3) military competition will stimulate the increased acquisition of armaments and increased investment in military technology.

    Defensive restructuring seeks to alleviate the security dilemma by limiting a nation's capabilities for cross-border attack, improving its capacity to resist aggression, and decoupling it from competitive offensive arms racing. The concept of a defensively-oriented military embodies a break with the dominant trend in security policy, which stresses punitive deterrence and, in the event of war, a quick transition to large-scale offensive action. By contrast, a defensively structured military would seek to deter aggression principally by lowering an aggressor's probability of success. If deterrence fails, it seeks to contain and exhaust aggression while avoiding escalation.

    By relinquishing the threat of large-scale cross-border offensive action and avoiding the risks inherent to such action, a defensive defense lessens the danger of preemption in a crisis and reduces the pressures for escalation. In this way, it increases the scope of diplomacy and helps create an atmosphere of trust without compromising the capacity for defense. Moreover, because this approach seeks to build on the inherent strengths of a defensive posture, it can provide security at a lower cost.

    Defensive restructuring is not, primarily, a matter of banning classes of "offensive weaponry". An effective armed force needs to be able to carry out tactical defense and offense and must have the requisite units, weaponry, and training. What determines the overall defensiveness or offensiveness of the force is how the units are put together, their proportions, the operational doctrine, and the national strategy. This is a complex set, but it is not so complex that it defies meaningful analysis or policy development.

    There are several avenues of defensive restructuring which can be encouraged through arms control, arms transfer, and military assistance policies. First, nations can move in informal concert to modernize their armed forces along nonoffensive lines. Second, nations can negotiate measures of arms reduction that selectively limit those weapons and equipment most vital to large-scale offensive action. Finally, arms exporting nations can agree to limit the transfer of offense-oriented systems, while leaving uncontrolled the transfer of systems vital to a more narrowly defined defense.

    Comprehensive defensive restructuring for global or inter-regional military powers, such as the United States, Britain, France, or Russia, is a special issue. Their militaries all have the capacity to "project" power far from their borders - a primary offensive characteristic. Rigorous defensive restructuring would involve a very dramatic rollback in their capabilities and entail their abstention from unilateral military activism. This is an appealing goal, but its realization will likely require both the prior evolution of effective global security agencies and a broad-based defensive restructuring of national militaries.

    Nonetheless, the major powers could begin limiting their power projection forces in a number of stabilizing ways. Such forces could be re-fashioned for "defensive support" missions with the aim of bolstering the defenses of smaller nations threatened by aggression. To address concerns about military hegemony, the major powers could design their defensive support units to be structurally dependent on the defensive array and infrastructure of host nations. Among other things, this means emphasizing combat support elements, rather than self-contained offensive maneuver units. Such a shift from traditional power projection to defensive support would also make superfluous much of the existing military capabilities for forced entry. These derive from large naval and long-range tactical air forces, airborne army corps, amphibious assault units, and large special operations forces. As a further confidence-building measure, such defensive support missions should be strictly multinational in character and increasingly under the auspices of global agencies.

Political Importance of Military Policy

    Historically, the American left has played a leading role in objecting to the abusive exercise of American military power. On several occasions, its efforts have made a critical difference: Vietnam being the most prominent recent example. While these efforts to deny options to political elites have been partially successful, they have not born lasting improvements in the credibility or political prospects of the left. Political advancement of the left requires supplementing its familiar reactive stance of protest with a positive vision of a military policy for the US.

    Today a centrist Democrat occupies the White House. His defense policies are barely distinguishable from those of his conservative Republican predecessor. The election to the presidency of a progressive who would set a fundamentally different course is a distant prospect. But we can be sure no progressive will be elected without the American people's trust regarding national security issues. And the American people will not lend their trust unless convinced that the left takes their security concerns seriously.

    These concerns do not reflect a simple or precise calculation. In an increasingly interdependent world with rapid communications and travel, even remote threats can seem too close for comfort. This personalized sense of insecurity also stirs a desire for a moral force in the world, something that can act to dispel aggression and the madness of war. Left and right continually contend to define the source of insecurity and the nature of that moral force.

    Twice in recent times, the American left succeeded in defining the public terms of security policy discourse. Once was during the Vietnam era, as people began to feel that the real threat was not distant communism, but rather the continuation of a costly and dangerous war that they neither supported nor understood. The other time was during the Freeze movement when people began to perceive that the real threat to life and morality was the nuclear extremism of their own government.

    Both the Vietnam war and the Reagan administration's nuclear extremism provided an opening for the left. For the most part, the left has filled this opening with a combination of facile anti-militarism, which asserts that there are no real military security threats, and a reflexive anti-interventionism which seems ready to abandon weak nations to the aggression of others. To continue to hold fervently to such reactive stances will only serve to undercut the credibility and moral leadership of the left on national security issues.

    Today the world stands poised between a past in which nations sought to ensure their security primarily through armed deterrence and exclusive military alliances, and a future in which inclusive global agencies and nonmilitary means can play the leading role in guaranteeing the peace. Yet instability and conflict, both residual and new, continue to beset many regions of the world. What is now required is a transitional security policy that attends to immediate security concerns using the tools at hand, while forging new tools and institutions that can carry the world into a realm of greater freedom.

    This article has attempted to illustrate what the left could bring to this critical transition. A comprehensive military policy from the left can assuage people's fears and offer progress toward a higher moral ground. Whether or not the left is up to this challenge depends on its capacity to outgrow its own brand of old thinking.

Citation: Charles Knight, "The Left and the Military", Dissent, Fall 1994

A PDF version of this article is available at https://comw.org/pda/fulltext/94theleftandthemilitary.pdf

Putin Has No Red Lines

By  Nigel Gould-Davies

New York Times, 2 January 2023

“What are Putin’s red lines?”

This question, asked with growing urgency as Russia loses its war in Ukraine but does not relent in its aggressions, is intended to offer analytical clarity and to guide policy. In reality, it is the wrong question, because “red line” is a bad metaphor. Red lines are red herrings. There are better ways to think about strategy.

“Red lines” implies there are defined limits to the actions that a state — in this case, Russia — is prepared to accept from others. If the West transgresses these limits, Russia will respond in new and more dangerous ways. A red line is a tripwire for escalation. Western diplomacy must seek to understand and “respect” Russia’s red lines by avoiding actions that would cross them. Russia’s red lines thus impose limits on Western actions.

There are three flaws to this reasoning. First, it assumes that red lines are fixed features of a state’s foreign policy. This is almost never the case. What states say, and even believe, that they would not accept can change radically and quickly. In 2012 President Barack Obama said that Syrian use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that would invite “enormous consequences.” Yet when Syria killed hundreds of civilians with the nerve agent Sarin the following year, as numerous watchdog groups reported, the U.S. response was muted. The Taliban’s return to Kabul in August 2021 — an outcome the West had spent two decades and trillions of dollars preventing — was the brightest of red lines until, in the face of changing priorities and a different view of costs and benefits, it suddenly wasn’t.

These are not exceptions. In truth, red lines are nearly always soft, variable, and contingent — not etched in geopolitical stone. While national interests, as Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, said, may be eternal, the way they manifest themselves as specific commitments will reflect temporary, shifting circumstances — among them, relative power, perceptions of threat, domestic calculations, and wider global trends. Diplomacy should therefore seek not to avoid an adversary’s red lines, but to change them.

Creative and assertive strategy does not pre-emptively constrain itself by fear of what the other side might find unacceptable. Rather, it coordinates all the elements of a situation to induce an adversary to accept its goals.

The second flaw of “red line” orthodoxy is that, in fixating on a state’s escalatory response, it considers only the risks and dilemmas this would impose on an adversary, and not those that the escalating state itself faces. For escalation means acting in ways that are more dangerous for everyone, and that had previously been judged too risky to contemplate. Such a decision must take into account the likely costs as well as benefits. Escalation is a choice, not a tripwire — one an adversary can deter by credibly conveying the costs this would incur.

The third flaw is that preoccupation with red lines invites deception. A state will seek to manipulate an adversary’s desire to restrain itself by enlarging the range of interests it claims are “fundamental” and actions it considers “unacceptable.” Fear of escalation thus encourages an escalation of bluff.

Exposing these flaws can help craft better policy. Concerns about Russia’s “red lines” are driven above all by the fear that Russia might resort to nuclear escalation. The West should avert this by deterring Russia rather than by restraining itself — or pressuring Ukraine to do so — for fear of “provoking” Russia. 

It can do so by communicating the certainty of severe consequences should Russia use nuclear weapons. Russia has tried and failed to impose red lines with nuclear threats several times since the war began — most recently in November, when Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson just six weeks after Vladimir Putin had declared it part of Russia. Ukraine and the West rightly rejected these bluffs, and should continue to do so.

The concept of red lines has its uses. Its origins lie in the study of negotiation, where they define a state’s minimum conditions for an acceptable agreement. If these are not met, the state can walk away. Here, red lines are fixed and other states can find it very useful to discover what they are — as America understood when, for example, it decrypted the Japanese negotiating position before the talks that led to the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922.

But to apply the special case of negotiation — with few parameters and a narrow range of outcomes — to a complex, fluid, and much wider geopolitical rivalry is a category error. While the danger of Russian nuclear escalation may rise and should be studied carefully, there is no special, separate category of actions that the West or Ukraine might take that would automatically trigger it. 

Russia has no red lines: It only has, at each moment, a range of options and perceptions of their relative risks and benefits. The West should continually aim, through its diplomacy, to shape these perceptions so that Russia chooses the options that the West prefers.

America has done this before. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most dangerous nuclear confrontation so far, the Soviet Union’s position shifted in a matter of days, ultimately accepting an outcome that favored the West. Had “red lines” thinking been in vogue, America might well have accepted an inferior compromise that weakened its security and credibility.

While Russia is more invested in subordinating Ukraine than it was in deploying missiles to Cuba, the logic is the same. In 1962, America persuaded the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, that removing nuclear weapons from Cuba was, however unpalatable, a better choice than deploying them. Similarly, the West should now aim to persuade Mr. Putin that withdrawing his forces from Ukraine is less perilous than fighting. He will be likely to do so if he understands that a long war threatens his regime — whose preservation seems to be the only thing he values more highly than a subordinated Ukraine — by fatally weakening domestic cohesion or by escalating out of control.

America should focus on three things. First, it should no longer declare that there are measures it will refrain from taking, and weapons systems it will not provide, to support Ukraine. To signal unilateral restraint is to make an unforced concession. Worse, it emboldens Russia to probe for, and try to impose, further limits on U.S. action — making the war more, not less, risky.

Second, America, with its partners, must make clear that time is working against Russia — not in its favor, as Mr. Putin still believes. The West should demonstrate readiness to mobilize, and quickly, its huge economic superiority to enable Ukraine to defeat Russia and to impose further severe sanctions. The military and economic costs to Russia will drain its far more limited resources and place greater strains on the regime.

Third, the West should make clear to a wide range of Russian audiences that it is safe to end the war by leaving Ukraine. An orderly withdrawal is unlikely to lead to regime change, let alone the breakup of Russia. Neither outcome is an official goal of Western policy, and talk of them is unhelpful and even counterproductive. Some in the West will resist the idea of any such reassurance. But if Russia’s elites conclude that it is as dangerous for Russia to leave Ukraine as to stay, they have no incentive to press for an end to the war. Reassurance does not mean compromise.

Pursued firmly and resolutely, these diplomatic “shaping operations” in support of Ukraine’s military campaign can ensure that Russia’s least-bad option aligns with what the vastly more powerful West wants. Such a strategy is the opposite of accepting red lines. 

Revealingly, “red lines” is the mirror image of an earlier metaphor used at the start of the war. When Russia looked strong, many proposed giving Mr. Putin an “off-ramp” to persuade him to stop fighting. Now Russia is weaker, they call for Western restraint to persuade him not to fight more recklessly.

Both approaches would reward Russian aggression by shifting Western policy in line with Russia’s preferences. Mr. Putin was not given an off-ramp then, and he should not be allowed to define the limits of Western policy now. Strategy needs rigorous thought, not lazy metaphors.

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Nigel Gould-Davies (@Nigelgd1) is the senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He was the British ambassador to Belarus from 2007 to 2009 and was the head of the economic section at the British Embassy in Moscow.

Citation: Nigel Gould-Davies, "Putin Has No Red Lines," New York Times, 01 January 2023.