Letter: Don’t assume Ukraine is model for future wars
From Harlan Ullman, Chairman, The Killowen Group; Senior Adviser, The Atlantic Council, Washington, DC, US
Rana Foroohar’s “Defence budgets are being wasted” (Opinion, May 26), published on America’s Memorial Day, misses the strategic context for which military forces should be designed. Error number one is using the Ukraine war as the model for future conflict. The critical difference is that neither Ukraine nor Russia remotely possesses the military strike capability of the US.
When Vladimir Putin threatened the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, he was warned by the Biden administration that the US would and could exact a huge price by targeting Russian forces in Ukraine — something that the US was very capable of doing.
Clearly, Nato members should be amenable to adopting an alliance-wide strategy along the lines of a “porcupine defence” — using Ukraine’s example to put in place sufficient military might to make any Russian attack on the west too costly to contemplate. But they are not doing so. And, frankly, Russia lacks the capacity to launch an attack on the west and will be unlikely to do so for the better part of a decade.
Unmentioned and where Russia has a great advantage is in “active measures”, also known as “hybrid, grey zone and asymmetric war”, namely using cyber and infrastructure attacks along with dis- and misinformation and influencing operations to weaken the west. There, more money must be spent. But before we charge like the Light Brigade of old into drawing too many lessons from the Ukraine war, a little more introspection would not be a bad thing.