A year in, the Ukraine war is taking on ever more dimensions. It is now clearly becoming a non-proxy war between the U.S. - along with its Nato client base - and Russia, as evidenced by the role of U.S. and allied intelligence in directing Ukraine artillery and missile strikes (see below.) In the U.S., it has ignited an internal war for the soul, of the Republican party. Donald Trump, who fondly recalls the boost his denunciations of “forever wars” brought him in 2016, is now running on an explicitly antiwar platform, denouncing Ukrainian “dominance” of U.S. policy and calling for an end to aid. Now Ron DeSantis, Trump’s most dangerous rival for the GOP 2024 nomination, appears to be shifting from his traditionally martial stance to denounce the “blank check” bestowed on Ukraine, telling Fox News “I don’t think it’s in our interest to be getting into a proxy war ... over things like the borderlands or over Crimea.” (“Borderlands” is the literal meaning, in Russian, of “Ukraine.”). DeSantis’ statement swiftly garnered him a finger wagging from the militarist wing of his party, as represented by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and congressional Republicans, who are well cushioned against such dangerous sentiments by fat campaign checks from weapons industry profiteers such as Lockheed. But DeSantis, who normally never sees a corporate donation he doesn’t like, clearly understands that the base recoils from foreign wars, and will vote accordingly. One might almost call this particular dispute “Lockheed versus MAGA.”
This threat to support for the war has clearly been very much on the minds of the Biden Administration. CIA Director William Burns’ widely reported warning to Zelensky in January that Ukraine has six months to make significant gains before U.S. largesse begins to whither. Less publicized has been his alleged further forceful admonition to Zelensky that the U.S, is well aware of Ukrainian officials’ pilfering of U.S. aid, at a very senior level, and that Ukrainian military leaders “know it too” – which warning would seem to have prompted the sacking of adozen senior officials soon after Burns left town. (National Security Council spokesman John Kirby later told reporters that the White House had “no indication” that U.S. aid to Ukraine has been misused or stolen.)
Meanwhile, reports in western media of U.S. intelligence “providing coordinates” for HIMARS missile strikes do not quite tell the whole story. It is clear that Nato and other alliedsurveillance is integral to the war effort, passing real time intelligence regarding precise location of Russian targets to Ukrainian forces on the ground. According to the well-informed military blogger “Simplicius” this support is serviced on a worldwide basis:
The totality of the NATO and ‘Five Eyes’ infrastructure is being utilized 24/7 as a sort of vast rear-end cloud-service and mega-processing/computational-cycle capacity for Ukraine’s frontline forces. Hundreds of satellites, including dozens of imaging ones with 5cm/pixel resolution, skim every inch and quarter of Russian territory, searching for actionable hidden targets. The data is then processed and collated by thousands of fulltime NATO/Five Eyes analysts working in distribution centers all over the world, then fed directly to the Ukrainian crews by way of Starlink and other datalinks, which Ukraine can then sub-distribute via their innovative ‘Nettle’ integrated system to feed those targets to a variety of sector artillery and other systems.
The ubiquity of ISR – Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance – on both sides, have seemingly turned the war zone into a vast video game, in which targets can be identified, targeted, and struck in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. (Unless of course clouds, still the neutralizer of high-tech sensors, get in the way.) Equally interestingly, surveillance on a local basis appears to be profitably in the hands of the Shenzhen DJI Sciences and Technologies corporation, controlled by founder Wang Tao, the world’s first drone billionaire. Frontline units, both Ukrainian and Russian, in the war both favor Mr. Wang’s products in preference, at least on the Ukrainian side, of more expensive and compoles variants such as the heavily publicized U.S. Switchblade drone. Indignant reports of Russian forces utilizing Mr. Wang’s product to spot for artillery strikes come on the heels of glowing descriptions of Ukrainian units using the same $6000 models for identical purposes.