Biden's Continuing Misguided Effort to Preside Over the Ukraine War
Musings
In recent days we have heard a number of comments regarding the Biden administration's loosening of its controls over the weapons the US has forwarded to Ukraine to defend itself. Except for a few minor limitations it is hard to understand why there are any controls placed on the weapons we send to Ukraine. Ukraine is fighting a war to defend itself from extinction. Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia is the largest country in the world with the largest supply of natural resources in the world. It has four times as many people as Ukraine and yet, Ukraine has withstood the Russian onslaught for 2 1/2 years. That in itself is amazing.
The United States has been one of the main suppliers of Ukraine with weapons to defend itself. However, the United States has placed a number of restrictions on the weapons we have sent. Indeed, we prohibited Ukraine from shooting any of the American munitions into Russia. That creates the interesting war scenario where Ukraine is supposed to just sit there and defend itself while Russia does whatever it wants to prepare assaults, bombard any portion of the Ukraine that desires, make various assaults into the Ukrainian territory, and the Ukraine is not allowed to respond until Russian assaults hit the Ukrainian border. That is a mind boggling way to fight a war. With all the brainpower assembled inside the Beltway in Washington DC it is hard to understand how the Biden administration has decided that this is a good policy.
There has been a more recent loosening of those controls but they are still in place so that missiles that are sent to Ukraine can only go a limited distance and not reach Russian supply bases and infrastructure. In addition, we now learn that the Biden administration has put a number of constraints on the more recent arms supplies it sent so that this weaponry can only be used in certain places and with certain approvals. Mind boggling.
Contemplations
The Biden reasoning for all of these controls is that they don't want the war to escalate! We have been through this approach many times and it has always failed. It is unclear why politicians in Washington DC always decide that they have a better way to handle ground level military decisions halfway around the world than the people actually involved in the fighting. It must be part of the ego boost that comes with getting elected to such positions and/ or being part of the entourage that follows the leadership around. They develop a self importance and think that they are in a much better place to handle these issues than anyone else.
To my recollection all the times our politicians in Washington dictated strategy have been failures. Evan if we go back and look at Roosevelt, and Churchill from his perch in England, in World
War II we find that each of them offered a number of poor strategies and actions which interfered with the military efforts to defeat the enemy.
If we fast forward a little bit to Korea we find the Truman administration sending confusing directives to the battlefront for approximately 3 years. Next we get to the Vietnam era where we had Lyndon Johnson his secretary of war Robert McNamara and then Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger actually directing the war in Vietnam day by day from their offices in Washington DC. Somehow they felt that looking at maps and reports that came back from Vietnam made them in a much better position to move forces around and dictate how they would act than were the admirals and generals in the field whom they had placed there to command the troops and their actions in Vietnam. That entire episode was an absolute disaster. Perhaps Joe Biden has not read any histories of that debacle or perhaps he has forgotten that he lived through it.
Our record in the several Middle Eastern wars and all of the endless political direction that came out of various administrations in Washington to direct the fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan and Syria and other areas of Middle East were consistent failures. We again find directives from the political administrations which did nothing too achieve concrete goals, nor allow the troops in the field to produce a desired result.
In theory we have learned this lesson many times. It is hard to understand why we are hampering Ukraine by once again placing political constraints on the use of our weapons.
Thoughts
This does not seem to be a difficult issue. There may be a few constraints that are appropriate to put on the use of our weapons in fighting Russia. For example, the Ukrainians should not try and blow up the Kremlin. They should not try to blow up civilian targets. Such basics are simple. However, the Russian rail network, utility infrastructure, military staging dumps, oil and gas systems and any number of other targets in Russia that provide the underlying support for the Russian military should be fair targets for the Ukrainians. The political brain trust inside the Beltway in Washington DC should cease dictating war strategy and work on trying to get the proper support to the Ukrainian military.
Obadiah Plainman
Copies of all previous postings of this blog can be found at: thoughtscm.com